Synopsis Soak is a new visualization of Mumbai’s terrain.  It presents Mumbai in an estuary, a fluid threshold between land and sea.  It encourages design interventions that holds monsoon waters rather than channel them out to sea; that work with the gradient of an estuary; that accommodate uncertainty through resilience, not overcome it with prediction.  It moves Mumbai out of the language of flood and the widely accepted trajectory of war with the sea and monsoon that this language perpetuates.  It recovers the world of soak.

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha have focused their artistic and design expertise for the past decade on cultural and ecological issues of contentious landscapes.  Their investigations have taken them to diverse terrains including the Lower Mississippi, New York, Sunderbans, Rio Grande, and Bangalore.  They believe that landscapes are shifting, living, material phenomena that demand an attitude of negotiation rather than control.  Their mission is to create through innovative modes of visual representation the ground for this attitude in design.