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 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.

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.