Abstract
In 2003 I visited Bangalore for the first time, as a reporter, making the Indian IT capital a symbol of the emerging economic powerhouse. The reportage, written on commission for a journal, was never published. Ten years later I revisited Bangalore (Bengaluru) as part of the Memories of Modernity project, and I tried to approach the city from a different angle, both thematically and methodologically, juxtaposing my first journalistic impressions to some form of literary understanding. My tentative discussion on ethnography and fiction will take as its starting-point my previous “artistic research” on South Africa and Argentina, in which I have investigated the same material by both ethnographic and literary means. I am especially interested in the relation between the two practices as related yet radically different means of exploring a near or distant past of traumatic violence