Towards a Textured Counter-Visuality: In Conversation with the Exhausted Geographies Team

In this continuing conversation around Exhausted Geographies—a Karachi-based collaborative publishing practice by Abeera Kamran, Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani—we talk about the accompanying web project of struggle. Emerging out of long-standing research practices around land, development and displacement; this website is an interactive browser-based archive mapping the story of the historical township of Gadap as it undergoes rapid and violent transformation at the hands of the real estate mega-development project called Bahria Town.

Here, we also delve deeper into one of the essays in the first volume of Exhausted Geographies, which focuses on the 2013 movement to recover Baloch missing persons in Karachi. The author, Zahra Malkani, talks about the lack of information and secrecy surrounding the enforced disappearances of people from the region of Balochistan and the subsequent difficulty of mapping this sensitive and deeply violent practice that has been continuing over decades. She recalls the photographs of missing persons which were heavily circulated on online platforms at the time of her research. These networks produced a visual landscape of public protest, but they have since disappeared due to state policing of the internet in Pakistan.

_{(Featured Image: Screenshot of "Disappearing Rivers." Karachi, 2016. From the project ofstruggle. This project emerged from the Gadap Sessions–a course organised by Karachi LaJamia in collaboration with Karachi Indigenous Rights Alliance.)}  

Interview with Anisha Baid, 21 January 2021.

In case you missed the first and second parts of the conversation, you can watch them here and here respectively.