Exhausted Geographies
By Abeera Kamran, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani
Karachi is Pakistan’s industrial and financial centre and the fifth most populous city proper in the world. It is the most linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse city in Pakistan. It has also repeatedly been described in media at home and abroad as the most dangerous city in the world, delimited as an epicenter of terrorism, “a distinctive battlefield of the twenty-first century.” [1] In the past decade, crime maps and terror maps of Karachi have proliferated in the media, conjuring visions of danger, terror, and insurgency, reducing the city to a conflict-ridden warscape. While claiming to “open up” and make the city transparent, these maps also work to “close down” urban space under an intensified regime of surveillance and violent military control. In this explicitly cultural war, the discursive practice of visuality has new material consequences for the social and spatial structure of the city.
Exhausted Geographies is a collaborative publishing practice based in Karachi, led by Shahana Rajani, Zahra Malkani, and Abeera Kamran. The project emerges from our desire to engage with the city beyond the ubiquitous tropes and visualities of violence and incoherence it has been subject to. Each volume attempts to rethink current representations of Karachi while exploring a range of topics to provide new insights into the social, spatial, and discursive fabric of the city.
Image 1 | This map is a visualization of the narrative geography of Sindh (the province within which Karachi is located) written by the poet Mir Ali Sher Qani in 1767. Rather than depicting borders or physical features, the map focuses on the people of Sindh, noting the names of individuals and recording their movements. It traces the lives of people and the interconnectedness of Sindh with other cities and regions. Shayan Rajani, “Essay On Naqsha-I Vilayat-I Sindh,” Exhausted Geographies 1, 2015. Image courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
Image 2 | Exhausted Geographies Vol.II is a collection of paired image and text booklets engaging with landscapes at the intersection of infrastructure, war, and ecological crisis in Karachi. Photograph courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
Image 3 | Fazal Rizvi maps Karachi through a series of personal experiences, located within the city and communicated via unsent letters to his mother. Fazal Rizvi, “Uncanny / Unhomely,” Exhausted Geographies 1, 2015. Image courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
The project borrows its title from theorist Irit Rogoff’s concept of “exhausted geographies.” Rogoff foregrounds the precarious relationship between territory, boundaries, and identity, highlighting that moment of exhaustion where “territorial claims… cannot sustain themselves.” [2] For Rogoff, this exhaustion is not a mode of withdrawal or opting out, but rather a moment ripe with opportunity. She calls it a moment of treason, the moment where you abdicate a singular perspective through which to see or map the land, the moment where it becomes possible, instead, to visualize or construct something new through a multiplicity of perspectives or positions. [3] She discusses an exhausted geography not as a tired one, but as a geography in crisis, in which it stops performing the rhetoric imposed on it and “begins to perform an undoing rather than an upholding.” [4] Our project began in 2013, taking as a starting point a moment of exhaustion for an overdetermined city, its histories and geographies reduced repeatedly to clichés. It was a moment when it felt crucial for us to destabilize the power that maps were gaining in Karachi and to invert their colonial vocabulary.
Exhausted Geographies Vol.I opens up the map to an interdisciplinary group of writers, artists, urban planners, and lawyers. Keeping in mind the colonial history of the map form and its concomitant methodologies of seeing and representation, we are interested in not just tracing the frameworks underlying the epistemic violence of the map, but also subverting this tradition, undoing and pushing the map form to build a space that could hold the many realities of Karachi. Shayan Rajani’s “Essay on Naqsh-I Vilayat-e-Sindh” on Mir Ali Sher Qani’s narrative map of Sindh is an evocative example of a spatial imagination that centers the people of the province, without making distinctions between native and foreign born, celebrating their diverse genealogies and migrations in and out of Sindh.
Image 4 | “What is the visual architecture of longing in projections of Karachi?” Yaminay Chaudhri uses the map to excavate memories from the buildings and streets of her neighbourhood, the Darakhshan Township in Karachi. The disjointed arrangement and fragmented construction of the homes themselves offers a visualization of the architecture of longing. Yaminay Chaudhri, “Separation’s Geography,” Exhausted Geographies 1, 2015. Image courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
Image 5 | “What is the visual architecture of longing in projections of Karachi?” Yaminay Chaudhri uses the map to excavate memories from the buildings and streets of her neighbourhood, the Darakhshan Township in Karachi. The disjointed arrangement and fragmented construction of the homes themselves offers a visualization of the architecture of longing. Yaminay Chaudhri, “Separation’s Geography,” Exhausted Geographies 1, 2015. Image courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
Exhausted Geographies Vol.II further loosens the limitations of maps by developing a fluid and conversational relationship between text and image. The volume explores the emerging visualities, infrastructures, and landscapes at the intersection of development, war, and ecological crisis through text-image montages representing Karachi in ways that refuse transparent and unified narratives of the city. The two booklets “Jinnah Avenue” plot the periphery of Karachi through the experience of travelling down the oppressive network of new roads in the area, in particular the road named Jinnah Avenue. The maps here are built in the space between each pair of text and image booklets, privileging the sensorial over the cartographic.
In this way the publication acts as a device to navigate the city: we use artistic and interdisciplinary research methods to open up a range of possibilities through which to engage with its manifold lived realities. Rather than approaching the city as a fixed, knowable whole, we want to offer an assemblage of experimentations into the profusion of relations, encounters, and movements that is Karachi. We are interested in pausing and studying the city, even as it continues to endlessly change form.
We conceive of Exhausted Geographies as an affective object; we use it to read the city as much as to build a city. More important than the product, for us, is the aspiration to create and sustain a community around the work that enables the research to live outside of printed matter and to move into the lived experiences of the city and its many remarkable imagined futures. This collection of texts and images therefore becomes a catalyst for breaking space open in a city that does not cede space easily. They serve as tools for learning again new and forgotten ways of inhabiting a home.
Image 6 | Exhausted Geographies Vol.II exhibited as part of “groundtruthing” at Gandhara Art Gallery, Karachi, 2018. Photograph courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
Image 7 | Along the peripheries of the city, neighbourhoods such as Gadap are the chosen sites for “kill and dump” and “encounters”—the terms used for the processes by which citizens are abducted and killed. “Borders” Exhausted Geographies 2, 2018. Image courtesy of Exhausted Geographies
Notes
1. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 205.
2. Irit Rogoff. “Exhausted Geographies” (keynote lecture. Crossing Boundaries Symposium, INIVA, London 2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJOP9l0_nbI.
3. Ibid.
4 Irit Rogoff, “Exhausted Geographies” (conference presentation, L’Association Temporaire de Contre- Cartographes de la Republique de Marseille, September 2013.), https://ateccarem.tumblr.com/exhaustedgeographies.
Bios
Abeera Kamran is a visual designer and a web-developer based in Birmingham (UK) and Karachi (Pakistan). Through her work she is interested in studying the relationship between urban infrastructures and vernacular design cultures. In collaboration with Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani, she designs and publishes Exhausted Geographies.
Zahra Malkani is an artist and a lecturer in Communication and Design at Habib University. Her research-based art practice spans multiple media and explores the politics of development and infrastructure in the city. She has previously taught at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of the Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project seeking to politicise art education and explore new radical pedagogies and art practices. She publishes Exhausted Geographies in collaboration with Shahana Rajani and Abeera Kamran.
Shahana Rajani is an artist and curator based in Karachi. Her research traces the erasures and violence inherent in urban processes of development and displacement. She is the co-founder of the Karachi Lajamia and Assistant Professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. She holds a BA in History of Art from University of Cambridge and an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. She publishes Exhausted Geographies in collaboration with Zahra Malkani and Abeera Kamran.
