Smudging boundaries - territories

Vastavikta Bhagat

We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatio-temporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed. We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time. On smudging of territorial spatialities, forming new peer networks, post institution and connecting with the world.

SHRINKING

CROSS CONNECTIONS

Thesis Reviews for final year students were conducted online and Zoom links shared on social media and relayed live on YouTube. While this allowed invited discussants from different parts of the country and the world to participate, it also opened up pedagogical discussions to a diverse public like never before.While Zoom recorded an audience of 231 participants, YouTube had a visitation of over 2000 in 3 days.

CONTEXTS

While the immediate physicalcontext shrunk, the world came closer. We were now talking to peers from across the world in webinars, online juries,online workshops, biennale walk-throughs, etc. on ideas of space, justice, life, and living.

CONTACT WITH THE WORLD: NEW FRIENDSHIPS

In the frame above we see along with students and faculty at SEA, the two invited reviewers Bijoy Ramchandran from Bangalore, Andrea Pinochet from Hong Kong University speaking from her home in Oslo and an unknown figure right in the center of the screen Kardo Norradin Karim,

A small architecture school located in a suburb of Mumbai was now talking to the world.

REFUSE TO CONGEAL

One was not restrained by travel budgets time schedules etc.

This may open up ideas of new kinds of peer learning communities and collectives in the future, and new agile forms of institutions that refuse to congeal

and limit one’s imagination like most present institutional structures do.

SHRINKING CONTEXTS COMMUNITIES AND COLLECTIVES REFUSE TO CONGEAL

On searches on facebook we find that he is a lecturer at Salahaddin University in Erbil in Iraq and has a PhD in Landscape Architecture from the same university.

COMMUNITIES AND COLLECTIVES

PHOTOGRAPHERS, NEW WAYS OF OPERATING, FACETIME PHOTOGRAPHY

SMUDGING BOUNDARIES LOCAL AFFAIR WEBINARS MAKING SENSE TOGETHER

DISTANCING NORMS FINDING AGILITIES IN WORK

LONG-DISTANCE FACETIME PHOTOGRAPHY

SMUDGING BOUNDARIES

SEA City, a Fortnightly lecture series, which were a local affair at the school, open to public has a small budget that invited mostly scholars and practitioners from Mumbai and a few from the country, The event was attended by people from the city but many were deterred by traffic jams in Mumbai and the audience had slowly started petering off. Recently before the pandemic we had started relaying the event live on Facebook. This saw a few more people. But the audience never exceeded 20 - 25 people from outside the school. With the pandemic and the complete semester going online, we started a new series on South Asian Architecture and Urbanism hoping to challenge the narrow parochial nationalistic boundaries around which architectural discourse tends to revolve through questions around ‘identity’. In the frame is Kazi Ashraf an architect and theorist from the Bengal Institute and a chat by an audience member Salma Begum, informing the audience of an online archive the the work of Mazhrul Islam

A lecture to be delivered in Stuttgart, Germany had to be presented online. The organisers in Germany hired a photographer in Mumbai to make a film and to shoot the lecture to be shown at a hall in Stuttgart following social distancing norms.

TRANSNATIONAL SHOOTS

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