Garden City

Marvin Systermans

People are coming by the thousands, inflating the city, filling up its
spaces, pushing its limits into every direction. The seemingly limitless expansion of the city tears open its streets, fills them with vehicles racing each other, lets old structures decay while the modern shoots into the sky, throwing shadow on the earth that is covered with concrete, unable to breathe. Bangalore, the garden city as it was once known has become Indias IT-hub, the Silicon Valley, the place to be for the young, the dynamic and the digital. Every idea that is imposed on this city leaves traces in the materiality of the city’s many different surfaces. And pushed against these surfaces live the people who are overseen, the ones who keep the many motors of the city running, the labourers, in the shadows and the burning hot sun.
Garden City is a documentary research on the ideas of modernity, progress, development and their darker side coloniality, as articulated in the materiality of the urban spaces and the people who navigate within them. The series explores the impact that the IT industry and massive expansion of the city is having on the environment and the city as a habitat.