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Chained by Legacy

Crawford Market rose before me, a wound dressed in red brick, a hand still gripping the city’s throat. History gnawed at it, and now it stood feverish, neither dead nor fully alive. Colonialism was pollution—psychological,
cultural—seeping into a city’s bones, corrupting its rhythms.
The West had left, but its shadow remained.

Inside—flesh and fruit, the raw matter of survival. Goats’ throats slit
behind plastic drapes, their heads stacked in trays, eyes blank in death. The air thick, unbreathable. Luckily, a wide avenue was cut clean across the island, allowing breezes from the Arabian Sea to reach Crawford Market, whose butcher shops and produce stalls badly needed the ventilation. [1]

State of Affairs

Outside—another world. The market spilling over itself, metastasizing onto footpaths, choking the roads. Street dwellers, hawkers, and scavengers are the worst sufferers, as they spend most of their days in congested intersections where the air pollution is most concentrated. [2]
The blueprint had failed; the city had redrawn itself. Like Shanghai, Mumbai has become a city filled with street-level entrepreneurs, many of whom operate in a shadow economy where the line between the formal and the informal is deliberately blurred. [3]

Above us, neon signs flickered, their promises already peeling at the edges. Vodafone banners and Bollywood posters [4] warped in the heat, selling fantasies I could never believe in. Famous for producing […] glittery melodramas… […] It was an odd scene. [5]

And beneath it all, the pulse, the friction, the machinery of a city devouring itself. A hidden frequency, a rewired metabolism. This toxic waste and this acid rain generate conditions in which mutant Rhythmachines thrive. [6]

Mumbai’s Unfolding Paradoxes

If colonialism was pollution, then the city had learned to breathe through it. The market, the language, the very rhythms of Mumbai—corrupted, yes, but also reclaimed.
Here, beneath the shadow of empire, new forms emerged, neither wholly free nor wholly bound.
What if I wasn’t witnessing contamination, but a chemistry of survival, a process still unfolding?

Brook, A History of Future Cities [1]; Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste [2]; Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade [3]; Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan [4]; Hollis, Cities Are Good For You [5]; Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction [6]

“References to individuals, events and real places described in this book are the fruit of invention. At the same time, I would like to make it quite clear to the reader that everything he reads in this novel really happened, substantially, and continues really to happen.”

– Pier Paolo Pasolini, A violent Life

Hidden Frequency
Rewired Metabolism
Frank Ghery – The Tower of Arles, Arles
Paul Rudolph – Yale University Art and Architecture Building, New Haven, Connecticut
Yona Friedman – Spatial City
Yona Friedman – Photomontage Train Tracks, Ville Spatiale
Atelier Deshaus / Tian Fangfang – Su Yuan House and Garden, China
Atelier Deshaus / Tian Fangfang – Su Yuan House and Garden, China

Updating Alloy
Kazuo Shinohara – Tanikawa House, Japan
Liftbuild – Top-down Skyscraper, Detroit
Yona Friedman – La Ville Spatiale, Paris (Courtesy Yona Friedman Archives)

Decoded Maidan
Antonio Gaudi – Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
McKinnell & Kallmann – Boston City Hall, Boston
Aldo Rossi – Città Analoga
Arata Isozaki – Spring-Fall Bedroom, Joshua Tree palazzo del Bo Anatomical Theater 1594

New Data Sets of Foreign Assets
OMA – CCTV Headquarters, Beijing
Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
Globe Tower – Coney Island, New York

Loop of Randomized Mechanisms
Vladimir Tatlin – Tatlin Tower, Russia
Jean Nouvel – National Museum of Qatar, Doha
Andres Larin – Lotus Temple, New Delhi, India
Santiago Calatrava – Turning Torso, Malmö
Coop Himmelb(l)au – BMW Welt, Munich
HOK – Dali Museum, Florida
Snøhetta – Opera House, Oslo
Gensler – Shanghai Tower, Shanghai
Constant Nieuwenhuys – New Babylon
Bjarke Ingels Group – The Spiral, New York
Studio Libeskind – Vanke Pavilion, Expo 2015, Milan
Anish Kapoor & Cecil Balmond (Arup) – ArcelorMittal Orbit, London
Luigi Manini – Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra, Portugal
Donato Bramante – Bramante Staircase, Vatican Museums, Vatican City
Frank Gehry – The Tower of Arles, Arles
Fujian Community (Traditional) – Hakka Tulou, China
Peter Cook – Plug-in City: Maximum Pressure Area (Section), 1964, MoMA
Studio Wellington – Athfield House, New Zealand
Unknown – Neighbour Building
Leon Ferraro – The Architecture of Madness

> Any process of colonisation – the draft of a particular culture onto an alien site – Is in itself a PC process, the more so if it occurs in the void left by the extirpation of the previous culture.<

>If the essence of metropolitan culture is change – a state of perpetual animation – and the essence of the concept „city“ is a legible sequence of various permanences<

– Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (the city of the captive Globe, Downtown athletic Club)

Mauritz van der Vliet
Vinzenz Stadler

Crawford Market was never just a market.
It is a wound dressed in red brick, a memory that refuses to heal. A colonial imprint turned metabolic engine, it breathes through dust and neon, meat and myth. History didn’t leave—it fermented. Empire became sediment. Pollution seeped into the architecture of life.

A tower rises from the market’s spine—impossible, sprawling, unfinished. Each level a stratum of time: Gothic arches, Maharashtra balconies, informal scaffoldings, glass-wrapped startups, crumbling prayer rooms. Mumbai’s past and future, stacked without order. A rewired metabolism, responding not to vision, but to necessity. A skyscraper built from contamination, not despite it.

This is the story of a foreigner—a xenos—drawn to the market not to shop, but to listen.
Pasolini ascends this structure as if through a living operating system, guided by something unseen—a hidden frequency, pulsing through the fog of breath and engine fumes.

Each floor runs a script:
A ritual glimpsed through a gesture.
A field charged with memory.
A pattern unfolding across distant migrations.
A system compiled through randomized mechanisms.

The people he meets—vendors, drivers, coders—aren’t characters. They’re terminals. Interfaces. Their conversations aren’t memories, but modules. With every word exchanged, the alloy updates. Not purified. Not healed. But made workable—ritually, poetically, politically.

Pasolini came searching for the source of a pollution—only to find a system that had already folded it into its rhythm. Somewhere along the ascent, the moviemaker dissolved into the scene. No longer an observer framing others, he became part of the composition—spoken through, rearranged, inscribed by the market’s own logic. Not directing, but directed. Not recording, but recorded.

This is not a journey toward clarity.
It is a loop unfolding inside a loop.
A recursive ritual.
A skyscraper built from breath and debris.