Platform for Architectural Transfers in the Indian Ocean rim
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UPCOMING
CONVERSATION



10th July 2025
Thursday 5.00 pm IST

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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.



PAST
SESSIONS

PATIO Conversation No. 11 |
Madhumati A., Zahra Yasmoon & Dipti Shukla
PATIO Conversation No. 10 | Nicholas Bill & Chee Kien Lai

PATIO Conversation No. 09 |
Swati Chattopadhyay & 
Megha Chand Inglis
PATIO Conversation No. 08 | Labib Hossain & Javairia Shahid
PATIO Conversation No. 07 |  Shaikhah Ali Alsalhi & 
Ali Javid     
PATIO Conversation No. 06 | Sarover Zaidi & Saniya Siddiqui
PATIO Conversation No. 05 | Mehwish Abid & Johann Peiris 
PATIO Conversation No. 04 | Meenakshi Jain & Richa Shah       
           
PATIO Conversation No. 03 | Anthony Wako & Dhaval Chauhan
PATIO Conversation No. 02 | Kairavi Maniar & Esa Shaikh
PATIO Conversations No. 01 | Chetan Sahasrabudhe & Ashmita Gupta
 







PATIO
CONVERSATIONS

PATIO Conversations are open to all; we aim to meet once a month, and scholars get an opportunity to share their work in progress. These presentations may be on a topic of their choice, which may relate to one or more of PATIO’s thematic umbrellas, or even critically reconsider and reconfigure our definition of particular themes. Participants may include independent scholars, Master's students, or aspiring PhD students as well as postdoctoral researchers who can contribute as speakers or choose to be an active part of the audience. Each such conversation foregrounds two scholars presenting their work for 20 minutes, followed by feedback from relevant respondents invited by the PATIO team in relation to the topic, and finally opening the discussion out to the larger audience. As such, PATIO Conversations offers a platform for critical dialogue while both disseminating recently completed work and providing mentorship to aspirant researchers, including potential PhD candidates. These sessions provide researchers with the resources to further their work related to the state of the field by involving active experts and engaging with current bodies of relevant work, published or otherwise. 
PATIO Conversations is directed by Saptarshi Sanyal and Sarah Melsens with the help of Thematic directors and Coordinators.