NEXT on SEA Conversations

The Bookmakers

Winter 2024-25


At SEA, the uncertain and unclear relationship between texts and space has been one of the core focuses of discussion and exploration. We have experimented with drawings and performances as bridges to create new possibilities for these connections. In this series, we invite people who work with texts - writers, translators, biographers, and even book collectors - to help us delve deeper into this relationship. In many ways, they capture the energies of their subjects, offering new meanings through their texts. The series will include book launches, readings by authors and translators, and an exhibition of a book collection.


speakers

Nov 15, 2024.
Sonal Mithal (co-authored with Arul Paul)
A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive: Lucknow Queerscapes (Routledge, 2024)

Dec 10, 2024.
Nihal Perera
People’s Spaces: Coping, Familiarising, Creating (Routledge, 2016)

Dec 20, 2024.
Prasad Khanolkar
Passages of Play in Urban India: People, Media, Objects and Spaces in Mumbai’s Slum Localities, (Routledge, 2023)

Jan 17, 2025.
Mustansir Dalvi
Charles Correa: Citizen Charles (Niyogi Books, 2024)

Feb 21, 2025.
V Ramaswami
Translator of four volumes of short fiction of the anti-establishment and experimental Bangla writer, Subimal Misra: The Golden Gandhi Statue from America (2010), Wild Animals Prohibited (2015), Two Anti-Novels (2019), and The Earth Quakes (2024), all published by Harper Perennial.

Mar 07, 2025.
Shveta Sarda
Trickster City (Viking 2010) and translation of the book Mayyadas ki Mari / Mansion by Bhisham Sahani (Penguin, 2016)

Mar 21, 2025.
Priyesh Gothwal
BOOKSHOW on artists’ book (19-21 March)


this lecture series is supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is open to everyone across the world.
visit www.sea-city.in for event details

A SEA City initiative

session 4

Charles Correa: Citizen Charles

by Mustansir Dalvi

on Friday, January 17, 2025,
at 6:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

One of the first biographies on Charles Correa (1930-2015) written by Mustansir Dalvi, this monograph explores the many Indian and international influences that shaped Correa’s life. Correa’s life-work, Dalvi argues, is significant because of his zeal for urban equity in post-independence India, to uphold the claims of every Indian citizen to egalitarian housing and access to public space. The book chronicles Correa’s enduring successes as an architect, as well as the bitter disappointments he faced in his advocacy for an egalitarian and uniquely Indian urbanism.


about

Mustansir Dalvi is an architect and professor of architecture, poet and translator, author and editor, columnist and curator, academician and semiotician, urban commentator and historian. Mustansir Dalvi was Professor of Architecture at Sir JJ College of Architecture, University of Mumbai, from 2003 until his retirement in January 2024. He has been part of syllabus formation committees for nearly three decades, most currently he designed the Graduate Syllabus for Metropolitan Architecture (de-novo). He is currently a trustee of Art Deco Mumbai.

SEAPAVILION 2024

Liminal Pavilion

by RUST Collective
opening

on Wednesday, December 11, 2024,
at 4:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

SEA Pavilion experiments ephemeral architectural forms embodying radical and sustainable new ways to think about the question of shelter in a time of climate change. On its 10th anniversary, the School of Environment and Architecture, along with the above mentioned collaboratiors, invited proposals from architects and artists below the age of 30, to conceive of pavilions and other ephemeral architectural forms to conceive of an emotional, affective response to the changing monsoon in a city like Mumbai as the key aspect in their design response. 30 chosen proposals shall be exhibited in a specially designed winning entry built as a ‘shelter for shelters’ on the SEA campus.


opening programme
-----------------------

LIMINAL PAVILION
by Rust Collective

SHELTER OF SHELTERS
an exhibition of all the received pavilion design entries
during 11-24 December 2024, 10 am to 6 pm

along with a performance / reading of Kalidas’s
Meghdoota by students of SEA

on 11 Deceber 2024
4 pm to 7 pm

join us at
School of Environment & Architecture
Suvidyalaya, Eksar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091


This event is free and open to everyone.

session 1

A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive: Lucknow Queerscapes

(Routledge, 2024)

by Sonal Mithal (co-authored with Arul Paul)

on Friday,
November 15, 2024, at 6:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archives: Lucknow Queerscapes, by Sonal Mithal and Arul Paul, offers methods of using queer strategies to read the colonial archival and write erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories. Following nawab Asaf-ud-daula and nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the book provides a queer architectural history of Lucknow bookending the nawabi phase which lasted a mere eighty years. Asaf and Wajid were both subjected to colonial ridicule—one on the pretext of his homosexuality and the other on the pretext of being effeminate in mannerisms. To situate this ridicule, the book brings out words of disdain in the colonial archive that describe Lucknow architecture commissioned by the two nawabs. Reclaiming those words, we reveal the capacity of nawabi architecture to contest, discomfort, and disadvantage the colonial gaze. Nawabi architecture is presented as a form of drag embodied theatrically in the overlaps of the personal and the political ishq. Drawing upon embodied experience of the nawabs, nawabi architecture is redescribed using disorientation, position, proximity, direction, alignment, and non-alignment that disoriented the British visitor and recentered the agency and power of the nawabi state through its socio-sexual overlaps.


about

Sonal Mithal (she/her) is an architect, artist, and educator. She holds a doctorate from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MArch from SPA Delhi; and BArch from Lucknow University. She is co-founder of research and conservation studio, People for Heritage Concern which offers consultancy for conservation and urban revitalization projects, and art projects for the public sector. She is serving as chair of the Masters in Conservation and Regeneration program at CEPT University. Her research, teaching, and writing transects architecture, landscape architecture, queer studies, history, and architectural conservation. Her areas of interest are architecture approaches for climate change, feminist-materialism, and intersectionality which is central to shaping the built environment.

Arul Paul (he/they) is an architect and educator, currently serving as an Associate Professor at the Nitte Institute of Architecture in Mangalore. Their research explores the intersections of architecture, urbanism, history, and queer studies. Paul holds an MArch in History, Theory, Criticism, and Urban Design from CEPT, and a BArch from Anna University, Chennai. Through the lens of history and theory, he critically examines the evolution of pedagogy in response to emerging challenges and innovations, contributing to academia, research, writing, and practice. Committed to social justice and equality, they actively champion these values for all, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

session 2

From Victims to Agents of Change: How Ordinary People Create “Lived” Spaces

by Nihal Perera 

on Tuesday, December 10, 2024,
at 6:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

Space is central to society. Per mainstream discourses, social space is largely produced by the state and capital. Nihal Perera’s work takes issue with this preconception and addresses a significant gap left by the leaders in the field of social production of space including Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. As demonstrated in hisPeople’s Spaces(Routledge 2016), the adaptation, interpretation, transformation, and creation of spaces are also carried out by ordinary people. Perera argues that the vast terrain of ordinary actors and spaces which are currently marginalized should be reflected in academic debates and policy decisions and that the local thinking processes that constitute these spaces need to be acknowledged, enabled, and critiqued.

Adopting an inside-out perspective, empathic to the subjects, and using field studies, Professor Perera will demonstrate how subjects reconcile the difference between the intended goals of imposed/provided spaces and ordinary people’s own understandings and expectations of these, creating spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices. At the other end, the spaces ordinary people produce make the state and capital negotiate their needs. He will highlight the need to switch intellectual tools.


about

Nihal Perera, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Ball State University (USA) and the founder and director of CapAsia, immersive-learning semester in Asia (1999-2021). The two-time Fulbright Scholar (China and Myanmar) was also Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore and at King Mongkut Institute of Technology (Thailand), Graham Foundation Fellow (USA), Distinguished Visiting Scholar at University of Alberta (Canada), and an Erasmus Mundus Scholar (Germany and Italy). He also received three Fulbright-Hays awards. An original contributor to the field of “postcolonial urban studies,” and leading scholar of Colombo, his research focuses on how ordinary people negotiate and produce (lived) spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices. Professor Perera has published articles on gender, race, planning, development, Chandigarh, Dharavi, Yangon, and Gary (USA) and his books include Decolonizing Ceylon, Transforming Asian Cities, and People’s Spaces. He has also practiced as an architect (1977-1983) and been the Chief Architect-Planner of the Mahaweli Project (1983-1989), largest development project in Sri Lanka, and regional and physical planner of the Transmigration Project of Indonesia. He has also taught in Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, and Sri Lanka.

session 3

Passages of Play: People, Media, Objects and Spaces In Mumbai's Slum Localities 

by Prasad Khanolkar

on Friday, December 20, 2024,
at 6:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

In this book, Prasad Khanolkar offers a new way of thinking about ‘slums’ and southern cities based on a grounded engagement with the relationship between media, objects, spaces, and people in the everyday life of slum localities in Mumbai, India. Based on extensive fieldwork in slum localities of Mumbai, this book explores how its residents engage in different forms of play in order to extend and expand their field of possibilities, despite the limitations and fixities. The book attends to some of these playacts: imparting stories with different thicknesses, rehearsing roles on and offscreen, engaging in deceptive performances, experimenting with repetitive everyday rhythms, and recycling matter and forms. Through these playacts, urban residents explore the virtual abilities of different mediums to put bodies, objects, and spaces into new forms of relationships and create passages to depart from programmed urban futures. By attending to these proliferating urban passages of different residents in slum localities, the book makes a case for rethinking southern cities as mediums for urban lives to converge and depart without an overarching framework.


about

Prasad Khanolkar is an urban scholar with a background in the fields of architecture, planning, human geography and South Asian Studies. His work as an academic and a practitioner largely focuses on the incongruous and collaborative operations through which marginalised urban residents assemble urban lives and habitats in different cities of the Global South. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment and Architecture, Mumbai.