Invisible City is an exploration into choreographing a mindful city experience for the walker, to and through non-places of the city. In a series of workshops and walks conducted using the "I SPY" kit, Medha encourages people to notice abstracts through abstract places — curating a unique sense of place via photography.

You mentioned that your project gets your participants or the walkers to notice abstracts. So what abstracts are these walkers going to see?

I'm taking groups out, and each group has one abstract objective they have to look for. So these objectives are things that make you happy or things that make you hopeful around your environment. One of those objectives is also things that don't make sense to you or something that hinders convenience. There are a few that I hope eventually someone picks, which is “where the city sees itself”. The idea with these is that you interpret them however you want.

For the two walks that I have conducted, there has been a lot of discussion about whether things actually fall into this objective or not, just because I made it very clear to them that you photograph on your own discretion even though you're working in a group. The first group’s objective was, I think, what doesn’t make sense to you. There were things like steps being too far apart and we had a pretty long discussion about whether this makes sense to someone or not. And that was pretty interesting to me because these are things in the environment that you do experience every day but not necessarily noticing them. So it's more about how the body kind of engages with the surrounding than just simply visually looking at something.

Have the photographs captured by the walkers participants led you to any epiphanies about cities and their non-places?

Oh yeah, just because in both cases, it's not like people aren't discussing what they're capturing. It was very interesting because I think it's more of a realisation about the idea of the kit actually working. For instance in the first group, while people were looking at these abstracts which are more about how your body relates to a space and how the space kind of impacts your disposition, it was very interesting because Ananya came to explore a new part of town and find a lot of really nice places. I think the realisation is just the fact that being just a bit more mindful and being given the freedom to just walk and see, makes people more aware of what they like in an environment and what they would like to see more of in an environment. This is pretty interesting because one of the standing instructions is that you can't use Google maps. And I think that has really changed the way people would kind of navigate their space, especially if it's an unknown environment.

Is there a difference between you facilitating this process versus us doing it by ourselves? Or what do you think your project did for this experience?

I think because I've created a kit, I'm essentially an instruction card for them. I have these conditions and objectives, and both of them need to work together while ensuring that people are able to still have a streamlined experience. While facilitating, I do ask them about how familiar they are with the area and how they are going about this. I realised each group will take five minutes to strategize because of their conditions and stuff. I think I am also very aware that as a facilitator, it's almost like playing a video game essentially. I can't guide them anywhere and I'm just following them around.

The first walk happened at Maxwell station and I'm very familiar with that area. So it was just very interesting to see how people are kind of navigating a new space. Of course I can't tell them whether where they're going will lead them to let's say a bus stop or not. I will probably conduct walks in places that I'm not that familiar with just so I can also see as a facilitator, how would my role change? Because at the end of the day, I'm an instruction card. I have to just stay neutral because a lot of times they were like, “okay, what does this mean?” These are abstract statements at the end of the day, and I was like, “well, anything, anything you want, I'm not telling you”. This is your game. This is your walk. Do whatever you want, queen.