Bartlett Research Conversations: Divya Shah and James Dunbar

A hybrid Teams link is available – please contact Emmy Thittanond, g.thittanond@ucl.ac.uk, to request access to the link by midday, Tuesday 11 February 2025.

Landscape Perspectives of the Indian rural: Ecological and place sensibilities in the forest hamlets of a monsoon biome, the Western Ghats mountains, India

Speaker: Divya Shah
UCL Supervisor: Dr Tania Sengupta & Prof Tim Waterman

Abstract

Indigenous landscapes are often understood and represented through dominant and colonial knowledge systems. This research challenges this by reframing such environments as holistic cultural-ecological ‘biomes’. It looks at the forest hamlets of an adivasi (original inhabitants) community: the Kanikkarans in the Agasthyamalai ranges of the Western Ghats mountains and the monsoonal (seasonal rainfall) system in India. Historically, Kanikkarans have been peripatetic, traversing diverse landscapes with multiple entanglements across spaces, species, and time, until the Indian government forcibly settled them in 1970s under a colonial-era (1920s) forest act. This work explores how Kanikkarans bring their wider imagination and generational knowledge to their situated spatial practices and place sensibilities. It seeks alternative and speculative forms of representation working with Kanikkarans, illuminating their plural and relational lifeworlds. Transdisciplinary and drawing out 'emic' lived experiences, the research is grounded in landscape studies, spatial history, and anthropology. Methods include ethnography, drawings, and fieldwork retracing on foot Kanikkarans’ trajectories within the Ghats, its monsoonal forests, and their multispecies worlds.

The Function of Radical Critique: Evasions, Transformations, and Cooptation in Superstudio’s Radical Project (1966-1978)

Speaker: James Dunbar
Supervisors: Prof Robin Wilson & Prof Tim Waterman

Abstract

This research follows the 1960s Florentine architectural collective SUPERSTUDIO in their production of a radical project of critique.  Their project formed an institutional critique of architecture as taught in the university and professional practice.  SUPERSTUDIO challenged design and the architectural object through various tactics of evasion, subversion, and destruction.

This research is in the function of this radical critique and how it produced new subjectivities – towards what SUPERSTUDIO called a ‘new revolutionary society’.  This work rethinks the subjects and objects of the critique through utopian practices (operations of estrangement, education of desire) and political theory (successes and failures of ‘workerism’ through the late 1970s). Aesthetic theory informs a discussion of representation and the communicability of the image through SUPERSTUDIO’s photomontages and how the image/text contributes to a radical practice.  Their ‘radical’ pedagogy also outlines a rethinking of how critique informs practice and conditions subjectivities.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the Programme Directors, Professor Sophia Psarra, Dr Tania Sengupta and Dr Nina Vollenbröker; PhD Coordinators, Dr Stamatis Zografos and Dr Stelios Giamarelos; and other PhD supervisors.

Image: Ayyapan’s Kanikkudi (Kudi meaning home in the Kani hill dialect) in Anakaal hamlet located in the valleys of Kavi river amidst the wet evergreen forests of Agasthyamalai mountains, Western Ghats, Kerala (Photo: Bhaskar Ajit)