Sathenagar is named after the celebrated Dalit writer, poet and social activist Annabhau Sathe and its residents – largely from Dalit and Muslim backgrounds – share the struggles of Mumbai’s many self-built communities. Influenced in part by Annabhau’s role in Sathenagar’s creation, many of its residents also share a heightened sense of cultural inheritance and its potential to transform communities.
Sathenagar is not only a morphological organisation of space and structures, reflecting social norms and urban policies but also a place of dense social interaction, where notions of public and private blur into the proximate interactions between people, structures, infrastructures and other forms of life to create specific cultural experiences based on an active awareness of heritage and provenance.
Santosh's House
In recent years, Santosh and others in Sathenagar have been reflecting on what makes their struggle to remain in the city meaningful, that makes life prosperous, beyond achieving the specific goals of the movement such as secure housing and infrastructure.
Shankar and Jamila's House
While Mumbai’s informal communities are always available to the gaze of the privileged, [Samooha] observed they rarely occupy the most privileged stages as protagonists themselves.
The intention was not to create a museum-like programme to display the talents of a single community but to allow a community’s public expression, long trapped in specific forms of public discourse around protest and rights, to take flight on another, more universally visible stage.
All text from Venuturupalli, Vyjayanthi Rao. "How We Brought an Urban Settlement from Mumbai Alive at Kochi Muziris Biennale." DailyO, December 23, 2016. https://www.dailyo.in/arts/kochi-muzhiris-biennale-dalit-writing-fort-kochi-urban-expression-mumbai/story/1/14696.html.
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On Stage: Sathenagar Here Samooha. Samooha and MO-OF/Mobile Offices, 2016.