The Dewarists Stage at the NH7 Weekender, Pune
Mapmaking Miniature Multiverses where stars hang low and hot air baloons blink their eyes at you. Giant metal 3d animal constellations, and an LED screen projecting star studded skies.

My mother Nilofer Suleman started her journey into art as a Cartographer. She used to recreate these old Columbus era maps, and as a child, I'd spend hours watching her pour over them, creating rivers and mountains of ink with her fingers. 
 I think it's really here that both my fascination with travel and mapmaking began. And while her maps (and now her art) is very much inspired by the real world, and real streets, my maps were miniature magical multiverses, rooted only in the sky dome of the imagination. 

 

And so, I began to weave the Dream Universe of the Dewarists. The Dewarists is a show by Babble Fish productions that brings together musicians and artists from across the world to collaboratively create as they travel to different locations across India. Each episode is shot in a landmark building in a different inspired location, and for me that became the starting point of inspiration. I wanted to put down all these spaces that the Dewarists travelled to into one cohesive map. 

And that wasn't all. The larger idea was that behind this map of the Dewarists, would be animations of the sky that gave it a sense of movement and dynamism through the sets. 
And so I created over 40 animations that Activ8Media could use to VJ with. Here are gif versions of some of the animations. It was a beauty, The sun rose over the stage, rain clouds gathered as Shankar Tucker's band sang "Baadal barse", hot air baloons blinked their eyes at you, and when the sun set, the moon rose, constellations formed in the sky and lighthouses helped you find your way through churning seas. 

Close ups of some of the spaces in the map: