SEW-AGE: walking the wastewater infrastructures of Kol-kata

Kolkata was never built on solid ground. It was claimed from tidal swamp, cut open by creeks, and sustained – invisibly and continuously by the microbial (geomorpho)logic of the active delta, pre-dating the city by millennia. SEW-AGE walks this inheritance: its canals, wetlands, landfills, and caste-bound sewers asks what a city truly is when you follow not its roads, but its waste.

The exhibition moves across three interlocking registers. Soaky Kol-kata begins underground: in the alluvial silt, the submerged Sundri (mangrove) forests, the waterlogged memory the city has spent three centuries concreting over. Invisible Metabolisms surfaces what lives within that substrate: the microbial communities processing sewage into food, performing unmanaged bioremediation in anaerobic ponds of the wetlands, and forging antimicrobial resistance in landfill. It makes visible the more-than-human labour that keeps Kolkata functional. Field Guide to Kol-kata captures entities and remnants that researchers could witness while walking the wastewater infrastructures of the city. Here, the sacred and the impure dissolve, caste sediments into tunnel darkness, and colonial water hyacinth simultaneously chokes and cleanses the veins and arteries of the city.

Together, these works refuse the city’s “deliberate amnesia”. They treat wastewater infrastructure not as engineering but as a living archive – layered with matter, memory, and meaning that reconstitute one another across deep time. The sanitary workers here are both human and non-human. The histories here are both sedimented and still unfolding. SEW-AGE offers a method for thinking with waste, time, and the more-than-human city.

Painting by Pratyasha Nath

Soaky Kol-kata

Before it was a city, it was a swamp. Before it was a swamp, it was a sea.

The name gives it away. In Bengali, kol means shore or coast; kata, that which is cut open. Kol-kata, a coast sliced through by creeks and inlets, land perpetually negotiating its own dissolution. The Bengal Delta, fed by the Ganga, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna, carries more sediment than any river system on earth – and this city sits at its sodden edge, built not on solid ground but on alluvial remembrance, on silt that arrived before memory and will outlast the concrete poured over it.

The delta does not forget what the city refuses to remember. As groundwater depletes, as monsoons deepen, as the Bay of Bengal reclaims its coastline inch by inch, Kolkata will face – without language, without framework, without recourse – a reckoning it could have seen coming had it only learned to read the ground beneath its feet.

Soaky Kol-kata opens the ground beneath the city's foundations, and asks what was lost when we stopped calling this place what it is: a delta, still breathing, still wet.

Painting by Pratyasha Nath

Invisible Metabolisms

What does a city become without the organisms that have kept it alive without ever being asked?

Every city hosts a microbiome: trillions of bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses, and protists living in soils, water, air, built surfaces, and human bodies. The prior ecology is not replaced; it is overlaid. The delta city of Kolkata is a microbial landscape; the substrate is a metabolically active archive of anaerobic microbial communities that continue to process organic carbon that was deposited thousands of years ago, alongside organic matter entering the system today.

The cyanobacterial blooms run feral in the ponds of the East Kolkata Wetlands. The kidneys of the city are self-organising, unmanaged, and the basis of the system's metabolic productivity.

Adjacent to the wetlands is Dhapa, Kolkata’s primary solid waste site. Landfill, tannery zone, sewage farm, and human settlement all at once, this is the city's microbial gut: the site where organic outputs are broken down, where methane is generated and released, where chromium-reducing bacteria perform unmanaged bioremediation, and where the selective pressure of antibiotic residues and heavy metals is forging new configurations of antimicrobial resistance.