"Techno Ecologies" Participants

ABSTRACT
The intervention will present an experience made by the author in India on 2010, as a fellow of a workshop organized in Delhi ( India ). The title of the seminar was “Old Delhi, New Media” and the aim was to study the interactions with the use of new media and the spatial and conceptual dimension of Old Delhi, the walled city. The issue was very innovative and sensitive, mostly if applied in the reality of Delhi where the media, and their uses, can assume a particular importance, if declined in the ambit of the change and the resilience of culture. This paper will present a performance piece, made in Shajahanabad, one of Delhi’s oldest neighborhoods: the place where the sufi poet Mirza Ghalib spent much of his life, a unique – architectonic and socio-cultural – area. Today the neighborhood is a tourist destination managed by Muslim families. The contribution describes the performance piece, entitled Sacred Bodies, a walk from the India Gate to the Jaama Maajid. ( two of the most notable point in the neighborhood ) The path along the narrow alleys, through lively parts of the city filled with small shops and food sellers, was documented on video. The two performer, had also explored, the most private spaces inside the walls of the beautiful havelis: the characteristic houses of the ancient Muslim architecture in that part of the city. The goal of Sacred Bodies was to explain sensations and impressions linked with this area of the city and to present an alternative perspective on the architecture and on the peculiar social life of this zone. The media assume a visual communicative role, functioning as attractors in this part and showing new undiscovered point of view.