To Inhabit, With Care

The dominance of entropic discourses and processes has meant that a majority of planetary lives across geographies are exposed to multiple forms of uncertainties today: aggravating climate change, chronic toxicities, reconfigurations of sovereignties, recurrence of pandemics, and financialization of life, land, and labor across different terrains.

Inhabiting amidst uncertainties demands that we inhabit with care. “Care,” however, is a target of opportunity for techno-pharmacological operating systems of power, which have grammaticized care, that is, captured and spatialized it into risk, security, segregation, conservation, surveillance, warfare, crises, immunization, and emergency. The prevalence of such conceptions of “care” have restricted architectural inquiries and practices to parochial interventions, such as modern health care facilities, gated residential enclaves, large geo-spatial data collection systems, heritage conservation, sustainable and green architecture, design standards for preventing contamination, and urban engineering of “Smart” cities.

Located within this milieu, we at the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), Mumbai intend to open up the relationship between architecture and care by accounting for as well as departing from the hegemonic registers of care. The Monsoon 2023 SEA Conversations begins this exploration by asking: What does it mean to inhabit, with care? To inhabit, with care is not just an interrogation in to the medicalization and financialization of life, but also a proposition to invent careful ways for how we think, act, engage, and relate to oneself and others differently; what and how we attend to all that surrounds us; and what kinds of knowledges we produce and how we produce and impart them. The series thus aims to explore the spatiotemporal logics and labors of repair, maintenance, and change; the relationship between care, suffering, sacrifice, and violence; the ethics and responsibilities of caring as individuals and collectives; and the often neglected cultures of care that lie besides the hegemonic ones. The symposium invites eight speakers from different geographies and fields to explore these different aspects of care with the hope of speculating other ways of inhabiting this world.


speakers

06/05 Naeem Mohaiemen* <<
06/16 Pooja Khairnar+Anand Sonecha
06/30 Eliana Sánchez-Aldana
07/14 Elke Krasny
07/28 Mohit Shelare
08/11 Monica Narula
08/25 Nausheen H Anwar
09/08 Radhika Govindrajan
09/29 A Collective Reading on Care*

*on campus/hybrid


This is a hybrid lecture series, free and open to everyone across the world. The series is partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.

session #1

^{Afterlife: Jole Dobe Na | Grace}

_{Two films by Naeem Mohaiemen}

Monday, June 05, 2023 at 4:00 pm IST
_{venue: School of Environment & Architecture, CKP Colony, Eksar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091.}

This screening brings together two films about end of life and caregivers. Jole Dobe Na (2020) is a fiction film set within the haunting of a hospital, made in response to a prompt by Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective for the Yokohama Triennale, Japan. Grace (2022) is a documentary about Karen Wentworth, the second person to sign up for end-of-life options under the newly passed Right To Dignified Death law in Maine, USA.



about

Naeem Mohaiemen combines photography, films, and essays to research forms of utopia-dystopia in South Asia after 1947. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts & Concentration Head of Photography at Columbia University, New York.


The film screening will happen on SEA Campus followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.


This is a hybrid lecture series, free and open to everyone across the world. The series is partly supported by Urban Centre Mumbai.