Annual Conference, February 17, 2023
SEA completes ten years in 2024. Its explorations through the decade have engaged with questions on space in different contexts. Specifically, how space mediates relationships between entities, the spatiotemporal configurations these relationships take on, and how we experience these configurations and give them a form in different mediums. These questions were formulated to rework and retool architectural theories, pedagogies, and practices through inquiries into life around us.
The past ten years of SEA have coincided with the intensification of dominant operations across the world and produced exigencies that demand our attention today. The former include the hard lining of right-wing politics, deep sedimentation of differences, augmentation of corporate capitalism, erosion of democratic institutions, violent production of cities and large infrastructural networks, and the intensification of challenges posed by climate change and epidemics. These operations, mobilised through law and media, have exacerbated multiple forms of spatial disparities: displacements, polarizations, segregations, incarcerations, dispossessions, forced migrations, ethnic cleansings, and unequal exposure to toxicities. Across these disparities, differences between entities–differences of religion, caste, gender, race, nationality, and non/human–are translated into spatial forms of separation based on the properties of matter and matters of property. Alongside these spatial disparities, we also witness the proliferation of micro-narratives from different geographies in our everyday life. These are stories of joy and celebrations, of empathy and care, of cruelty and violence, of detentions and abandonments, of movements and lockdowns, of experiments and accidents. They relay across different mediums affecting us, but without a clear sense of determinate correlation or causality.
Situated in this flux, we at SEA intend to use the International Conference 2023-24 as a platform to have four slow and long conversations on ‘devising architecture amidst entanglements and exigencies’. The notion of entanglement holds differences within entities, while departing from the accepted understanding of difference as separation. Further, it considers each entity as a singular life, but composed of matter and stories that it shares with other entities, thus entangling their past and future trajectories in incongruous ways. How do we devise architecture in response to the current exigencies of intensifying spatial disparities, while being situated amidst and holding onto the entanglements? In asking this question, the conference aims to not only produce shifts in our understanding of matter, form, and space, but also speculate on new architectural theories, pedagogies, and practices for creating spatial forms that can hold entangled lives.
SCHEDULE
Opening Prasad Shetty
0930 - 1000
Conversation 1 A New Home for Ajiri: On Humanising Architecture
Sandeep Virmani and Rupali Gupte
1000 - 1115
Conversation 2 Contingencies, Composites and Situatedness
Eunice Seng and Prasad Khanolkar
1145 - 1300
Conversation 3 Research as Curiosity and Care: Learning from Architecture’s Others
Gauri Bharat and Rohit Mujumdar
1430 - 1545
Conversation 4 The Platform of Hope
Khondaker Hasibul Kabir and Anuj Daga
1615 - 1730
Closing Prasad Khanolkar
1730-1800
The past ten years of SEA have coincided with the intensification of dominant operations across the world and produced exigencies that demand our attention today. The former include the hard lining of right-wing politics, deep sedimentation of differences, augmentation of corporate capitalism, erosion of democratic institutions, violent production of cities and large infrastructural networks, and the intensification of challenges posed by climate change and epidemics. These operations, mobilised through law and media, have exacerbated multiple forms of spatial disparities: displacements, polarizations, segregations, incarcerations, dispossessions, forced migrations, ethnic cleansings, and unequal exposure to toxicities. Across these disparities, differences between entities–differences of religion, caste, gender, race, nationality, and non/human–are translated into spatial forms of separation based on the properties of matter and matters of property. Alongside these spatial disparities, we also witness the proliferation of micro-narratives from different geographies in our everyday life. These are stories of joy and celebrations, of empathy and care, of cruelty and violence, of detentions and abandonments, of movements and lockdowns, of experiments and accidents. They relay across different mediums affecting us, but without a clear sense of determinate correlation or causality.
Situated in this flux, we at SEA intend to use the International Conference 2023-24 as a platform to have four slow and long conversations on ‘devising architecture amidst entanglements and exigencies’. The notion of entanglement holds differences within entities, while departing from the accepted understanding of difference as separation. Further, it considers each entity as a singular life, but composed of matter and stories that it shares with other entities, thus entangling their past and future trajectories in incongruous ways. How do we devise architecture in response to the current exigencies of intensifying spatial disparities, while being situated amidst and holding onto the entanglements? In asking this question, the conference aims to not only produce shifts in our understanding of matter, form, and space, but also speculate on new architectural theories, pedagogies, and practices for creating spatial forms that can hold entangled lives.
SCHEDULE
Opening Prasad Shetty
0930 - 1000
Conversation 1 A New Home for Ajiri: On Humanising Architecture
Sandeep Virmani and Rupali Gupte
1000 - 1115
Conversation 2 Contingencies, Composites and Situatedness
Eunice Seng and Prasad Khanolkar
1145 - 1300
Conversation 3 Research as Curiosity and Care: Learning from Architecture’s Others
Gauri Bharat and Rohit Mujumdar
1430 - 1545
Conversation 4 The Platform of Hope
Khondaker Hasibul Kabir and Anuj Daga
1615 - 1730
Closing Prasad Khanolkar
1730-1800
venue
Lokshahir Annabhau Sathe Auditorium,
Byculla East, Mumbai - 400 027.
This event is free and open to the public.
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