Aditi Aggarwal

100-Foot Road (Drawing Installation)

Conceived during the lead-up to a residency situated on 100 Feet Road in Chattarpur, New Delhi, this drawing installation interrogates the formal and conceptual implications of scale, distance, and urban spatiality. The work comprises ten scrolls—each approximately ten feet in length—collectively forming a 100-foot linear narrative that both references and resists the metric logic of the site’s name.

The process began with an ambulatory mapping of the road: walking its length, photographing its shifting vernaculars, its frictions, and architectural inconsistencies. These images, mediated through the lens of the camera, were then translated into a visual grammar of line and repetition.

What appears to be a continuous linear drawing is, in fact, an accumulation of marks—sketched first in white pencil, then layered with white acrylic using a liner pen in an exercise of discipline and durational practice. The seemingly resolved surface belies a deeper material history: layers of errors, hesitations, and overdrawings are buried beneath coats of black paint applied with a roller, creating a palimpsestic surface that speaks to the instability of urban memory and the politics of representation.

The final act—retracing the white lines over the blacked-out surface—functions both as a revision and a resurrection. It is a way of holding onto the fragmented fidelity of the original photographs while simultaneously dislocating them into abstraction. The work confronts the illusion of urban order by making visible the edits, the failures, and the bodily labour involved in the act of drawing. As such, 100-Foot Road becomes not merely a document of place, but a critique of linearity itself—resisting cartographic fixity and foregrounding the fragile and unstable process of mapping as an embodied, temporal practice.