For Mumbai-based visual artist Prajakta Potnis, this sudden distancing of the physical body from the city during mass quarantine has forced her to reassess a fundamental relationship in her work: that among the individual, the city and the home. In March, Potnis won the Prameya Art Foundation’s Artist in Residence award, under which she was to work on a project in Paris, supported by Cité Internationale des Arts and Institut Français. The three-month residency was to begin in July, but has been postponed indefinitely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The project that Potnis had proposed was based on what was a simple idea of walking through the city and looking at it. Her starting point was French writer Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in which he imagines a character now ingrained in the history of art. The flâneur, a person who strolls through the city, observing its every detail without ever interfering, is a persona that has been taken on by artists and writers alike. Although one among the crowd, the flâneur never assimilates into the crowd. In 2012, during another residency in Paris, Potnis had taken on the role of the flâneur to create a work titled room full of rooms. In 2020, her plan had been to build on that work.
