Walking the neighbourhoods was a way of resolving the conflicts of history, reading through a bodily and visual engagement with the material worlds these neighbourhoods had produced in layers over time – you read in that materiality – in its expression, its style, its construction, its ornamentation – the everyday responses to human lives’ experience of history, of time, of place, of being – whether history hit us hard or quietly – it creeps into our lives in obvious ways and subtle gestures… all these are captured in the details of our material world – the ornamentation in architecture, the weave in fabrics, the patterns of our everyday existence expressed and all encompassed in the neighbourhoods, and in the neighbourhoods of our minds. The mind is never a nation, the mind is home and dwelling, the mind is a neighbourhood… it grows from the geographical location of the body, and in its conversations with ideas and imaginations, realities and myths, it travels to worlds and constellations beyond the physical body; the home is beyond us and the body is the wandering centre, it wanders in neighbourhoods, as it remembers and looks for home always, it shapes contexts while it continually expands boundaries, because the body moves in time and space, the biography is the cosmos, and the self maybe a place to dwell in.
The lecture draws an arc through many explorations vis-a-vis the self and the city, dwelling and belonging, via the tropes and subject of Home and the Neighbourhood. From the publication of Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press. 2009) to the doctoral research on architectural surfaces and urbanity, between ornamentation to neighbourhoods, to the many narrative and experiential explorations across various forms of being inside-and-outside of spaces, migration and belonging, memory and alienation, in neighbourhoods and spaces of shared living and their difficulties and pleasures.
Venue: Goethe-Instiut Mumbai Library, Coomaraswamy Hall, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), 159-161, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Fort
About Kaiwan Mehta
Kaiwan Mehta is a theorist and critic in the fields of visual culture, architecture, and city studies. Mehta has studied Architecture, Literature, Indian Aesthetics and Cultural Studies. In 2017 he completed his doctoral studies at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru, under the aegis of Manipal University. He was recently (in April 2022) appointed as the Dean at Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, at SVKM's NMIMS University. He was recently elected to the coveted International Committee of Architectural Critics (CICA).
He has been elected as the Jury Chairman for two consecutive terms (2015–17 and 2017–2019) for the international artists’ residency programme across 13 disciplines at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Since March 2012 he has been the Managing Editor of Domus India (Spenta Multimedia). From July 2017 to March 2022 he was Professor and Programme Chair of the Doctoral Programme at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad, and was also a founding member of the CEPT Essay Prize. He was the Charles Correa Chair professor at the Goa College of Architecture under the aegis of the Department of Art and Culture, Government of Goa for the academic year 2017-2018.
He authored Alice in Bhuleshwar: Navigating a Mumbai Neighbourhood (Yoda Press. New Delhi, 2009) and The Architecture of I M Kadri (Niyogi. New Delhi, 2016) and has written for various books, artist catalogues, architecture exhibitions, and journals. He has contributed on Modern and Contemporary Architecture in India and South-Asia for the recent and updated edition of Bannister Fletcher's "A History of World Architecture". He curated the mid-career retrospective on the work of architect and urban designer Rahul Mehrotra, and is currently working on other architect biographies - the works of architect and educationist Sen Kapadia, as well as architect and revivalist designer Jitendra Mistry, and the architect and interior designer Ramesh Edwankar. He has curated various exhibitions and delivered lectures across institutions in India and abroad including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Cornell University, Parsons New School, New York, as well as conferences in Portugal, Hungary, China, and Italy.