Design Museum Dharavi celebrates locally made crafts from a pushcart that can roll from one street to another.
Design Museum Dharavi celebrates locally made crafts from a pushcart that can roll from one street to another. © Design Museum Dharavi

The museum hosts exhibits celebrating the pottery, embroidered garments, wooden carvings and other handicrafts manufactured within Dharavi’s three square kilometers. Over two months, co-founders Amanda Pinatih and Jorge Mañes Rubio will roll the nomadic display through Dharavi’s tightly stitched neighborhoods, co-hosting exhibits, workshops, film screenings and lectures with local residents. Their goal is to showcase the design talent in a stigmatized area that the rest of the city mostly sees as a nuisance and developers mostly view as land for future high rises.

“We look at it in a completely different way,” says Rubio. “Dharavi is full of makers, designers, manufacturers and also entrepreneurs. We just can’t figure out how a place like this is still seen as a problem. We see it as part of a solution to issues of informal settlements not just here but all over the world.”

The Amsterdam-based artists devised the pushcart to be able to traverse Dharavi’s narrow lanes and engage members of the local community near their own neighborhoods, workshop spaces and small squares. Pinatih and Rubio were inspired by the thousands of hand-pushed carts that vegetable sellers and market vendors use in Dharavi to roam door-to-door. They developed the idea along with URBZ, an urban research collective based in Dharavi.

On the museum’s opening night February 18, the colorful displays of funky pottery and fan-like brooms on the brightly lit cart drew locals, journalists, design students, researchers and curious Mumbaikars. For those who might only visit this part of Mumbai to get a knockoff pair of designer jeans made in a garment shop, the message was clear: There’s craftsmanship to celebrate in artisan communities that have been honing it for generations. ... The Amsterdam-based artists see Dharavi’s maker community as co-collaborators. And they believe that if the rest of the city and the global community can recognize this creative potential, it could change the discussion on the future of Dharavi and perhaps other informal settlements across the globe.

The museum’s opening exhibit featured the pottery makers, or the Kumbharwadas, a well-established community that migrated from the neighboring state of Gujarat nearly 100 years ago. Like so many of the migrants in Dharavi from all over India, they brought with them traditional design skills that have been their livelihood for generations. Nearly 1,500 potter families still live together in Dharavi, and half of them still practice the craft to this day. Their area houses kilns, pottery wheels and thousands of stacked clay pots, a artistic ecosystem that risks being uprooted as the city mulls plans to redevelop the area.

Why a museum in Dharavi? 

Museums are the new cathedrals of the XXI Century, not just cultural venues but also tourist attractions, public squares and symbols of power and wealth for western cities. They provide the visitors with the possibility of being part of an experience that goes beyond the works exhibited. The Victoria & Albert Museum was a pioneer when it established the design object as a museological discipline in 1852. From the 20th century more and more modern and contemporary art museums started collecting design or, a term more often used by museums, applied arts. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam has been collecting design since 1934. The decorative arts, graphic and industrial design collection now holds around 70.000 objects (more than three-quarters of the complete Stedelijk collection). 

The Dharavi Design Museum aims to explore the possibilities of developing the first ever design museum inside the informal urban settlement of Dharavi in Mumbai, commonly known as one of the biggest ‘slums’ in Asia. By creating a Design Museum -a place for contemplation- we make this city within a city more liveable. Our main intentions are to acknowledge the citizenship of these people, to recognize their equal rights compared to the rest of the city, and promoting a greater exchange between formal and informal economies. After a visit to Mumbai we came up with the idea of creating the first design museum in Dharavi and since then we’ve been planning and developing this idea that finally materialized into the Design Museum Dharavi. 

Source: designmuseumdharavi