The Community as Archive
Sarah Melsens (CNRS and FLAME University) & Ishita Shah (Curating for Culture)
Women discussing photographs during the Workshop and pop-up exhibition ‘Remembering Pune’s construction workers: Stories from Wadarwadi’ photo: Abhiraj
In the early twentieth century, communities of stone and earth workers from the Wadar caste settled on what was then barren land on the outskirts of the city of Poona (Pune). The ample work available to them at urban colonial construction sites reduced their need to migrate for work. Today, the demand for stonework has decreased, and some of their descendants have turned to concreting, painting, or general contracting. What do Wadarwadi's community members think of this transition from stonecraft to contract work? How did they retain land that is now located in a prime area of the city? Drawing on community engagement related to these fundamental questions, as well as architectural observations and a social study from the 1970s, we demonstrate how the three-phased architectural history of the settlement reflects the changing positions of the community in the political economy of twentieth-century construction work. The talk will reveal the potential of ethnographic approaches to architectural historiography when archives are perceived to be absent. It will highlight the groundwork, visual tools, and processing work such a methodological approach involved.
Pamudu Tennakoon (Brown University)
Firi Rahman. “De Soysa building under demolition,” 2021. Photographs courtesy Zeeshan Akram Jabeer.
Investigating the place of colonial architecture in contemporary Colombo (Sri Lanka), this research explores how Sri Lankans understand, negotiate, and rewrite their identities in relation to their British colonial pasts. The recent surge of interest and investment in colonial architecture in Colombo demonstrates that colonial architecture still provides the backdrop for negotiations of the city’s history. This talk closely explores the De Soysa building, a recently demolished shophouse complex in the neighborhood of Kompagngna Veediya (previously Slave Island). To understand the De Soysa building, I move through historical archives, oral histories, haphazard preservation efforts, community archives, and the afterlives of the building in contemporary art and architecture in the wake of its destruction. Refracting multiple historical narratives of this building (which now exists as rubble), this research questions how people continue to occupy and relate to the material remnants of their colonial pasts. How do communities come together around buildings such as the De Soysa building? Ultimately, this work pushes against the discomfort present in allowing archival, oral, and artistic narratives alongside each other to underscore the importance of reconciling these histories.