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Summer Show 2021
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Rituals of Resistance: Narratives of Critical Inhabitation

Project details

Programme
Unit PG12
Year 5
Award
  • Distinction
  • Sir Andrew Taylor Prize

The frontiers of the ongoing climate struggles are entangled with political crises, territorial conflicts, migration and citizenship. The roots of this can be traced back to colonial extraction. The colonising tendencies of state power reappear to marginalise and subjugate minority groups—as evidenced by India’s elevated number of ongoing land conflicts. This problematises the status of citizenship for indigenous and marginalised people, who continue to fight displacement and persecution.

The project addresses the contested inhabitation of fragile ecosystems in the Sundarbans, situated in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. It proposes a self-sustained productive settlement that fosters a construction of spatial identity, while elevating the significance of indigenous land stewardship. Additionally, it seeks to proliferate the ritual narrative practices of marginalised and hybridised identities as a means to resist erasure, through the apparatus of a travelling theatre.

Rituals of Resistance critiques the exertion of state power in the borderlands, while questioning the value of standard property and land rights in such a context. Opposing the continued subjugation of displaced and marginalised people, it seeks to elevate vernacular wisdom, and celebrate cultural identities and hybrid ecologies.

Space, Narrative, and Identity

The project utilises the medium of ‘Pattachitra’ or traditional scroll painting, borrowing from rituals of storytelling in Bengali folk culture, to develop a spatial narrative.

Constructing a Spatial Identity

Reinterpreting the vernacular to (re)construct a spatial identity through rituals, narrative and spatial practices that contribute to the emergence of the ‘Third Space’.

Rituals and Identity

The project aims to develop a spatial narrative through its architecture — instrumentalising the myths, rituals, and traditions of the people to (re)establish their identity.

Negotiating Narratives of Resistance

The project utilises the apparatus of the jatra or travelling Bengali folk theatre to disseminate the Sundarban peoples’ narrative of oppression and their resistance.

The Carnivalesque as Counterculture

The project manifests through the medium of the carnivalesque in the performance of public rituals of storytelling – to subvert dominant assumptions and question authority.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2021
23 July – 07 August 2021
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