The glossary — supported by Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne, and Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai — was launched in March, marking a year since the first lockdown. The team which put together the glossary includes urbanist, architect and professor Prasad Shetty, Gupte, and designers of the project, Vastavikta Bhagat and Moomal Shekhawat. It has two parts — the glossary, which is a collection of 400 stories, and the exhibition, which draws up patterns from the stories. The landing page of the interactive exhibition is designed like a galaxy of floating spheres. “When one clicks on a sphere, they’re directed to a constellation of stories that put together a narrative. No two people can view the exhibition in the same manner,” Shetty informs us.

Bathing of vegetables.

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From documentation of increased app/screen time and how the balcony emerged as a new space for activities, to the proliferation of gharguti (small-scale, domestic) businesses, the glossary does a nuanced job of capturing the pandemic experience. The curators note that the stories broadly address four kinds of reconfigurations. First, there are spatio-temporal reconfigurations, with the idea of home collapsing. “For people living in small houses, the street, the neighbourhood and their workplace were home, which shut down. At the same time, the digital space became home for many. But with the deep digital divide, a lot of people suddenly became homeless,” reasons Gupte. Then, there’s sensorial reconfiguration — for instance, the dependence on eyes and ears substantially increased, mediated largely through the digital medium, while the sense of smell, taste and touch have been affected. “There’s also institutional reconfiguration, [reflected in] the cities of Mumbai and Delhi experiencing a breakdown of health infrastructure,  along with a crash in education system and government machinery. The last part is reconfigurations in work and living,” Shetty elaborates.

(From left) Rupali Gupte; Prasad Shetty; Moomal Shekhawat; Vastavikta Bhagat

The duo tells us that the glossary is a work-in-progress. “It will continue to grow until the pandemic fades away. It may become a physical exhibition and also a book,” they conclude.

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