CAMP are a studio and group of artists interested in infrastructures and forms of cinema and archiving. They have made works with closed-circuit television (CCTV) and video imaging since the early 2000s. CAMP have explored this medium and its technological evolution by entering control rooms with members of the public and using surveillance cameras to create new forms of documentary film.

Bombay Tilts Down 2022 is a culmination of the group’s longstanding engagement with CCTV. The work tests the medium’s limits while creating a new way to examine the social and structural hierarchies of CAMP’s home city of Mumbai. ‘Ultimately,’ says CAMP, ‘it is about cinema’.

The work was filmed using a remote-controlled pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) CCTV camera mounted on the 35th floor of a building in South Central Mumbai. The footage on each screen begins with images of distant horizons at sea, and slowly draws closer to the working-class neighbourhoods of Parel and Worli in the heartland of the island city. Each of the screens begins to zero in on particular buildings — almost like examining the scene of a crime — before beginning to tilt downwards. As the views continue to fall, we begin to notice people making eye contact with the camera. Some appear to be watching the livestream, controlling the shots. For CAMP, everyone is an actor in this city of cinema.