n space
Hello!
I am Swati Jain, a transdisciplinary architectural designer, artist, and researcher from India, based in New York City. My on-going research explores sensory planetary investigations for crafting observational ritual based models through the lens of magic realism.
The following spatial interventions respond to my philosophical inquiries on sociocultural, ecological, and multisensory approaches to foster collective empathy and indivisible futures.
Through designs, I create metaphysical spaces to inhabit different frameworks of time and space, to transcend the body toward an undivided space embodying limitless possibilities and new ways of being.
The spatial interventions below are Environmental and Cultural Embodiments, with playful elemental measuring apparatus to measure and unmeasure different landscapes.
Please reach out to me at
swati@unownspace.com
for collaborations and inquiries!
swati@unownspace.com
for collaborations and inquiries!
Feminist and decolonial perspective
I am investigating the concepts of presence and absence within ecological and cultural material histories. My focus is on how these elements are measured and displaced through economic and cultural institutions in and around New York City. I aim to re-wild and un-measure these atmospheric conditions using performative, ritualistic, and craft-based approaches from a feminist and
decolonial perspective. My goal is to highlight historical practices and create new ways for communities to
explore dimensions of identities and agencies through contemporary technology and reconstitution of
imaginative landscapes.
My conceptual prototyping involves exploring ephemeral phenomenologies and the movement of various environmental bodies (human, non-human, and other species) in time and space through archaeological
and ecological spatial designs. By staging new encounters, such as iridescent invisible textiles, decolonial dioramas for the MET, planetary game designs for un-measuring the city, and collective kitchens.
Recently inspired by Precious Okoyomon’s work, I hope to design plant objects that integrate different
plant species into our intimate indoor spaces, both literally and metaphorically. I seek to address
planetary biases and advocate for the liberation of material histories and ecological re-wilding. My aim is
to re-wild our bodies, homes, and cities through these new forms of spatial narratives. These projects represent a blend of creative experimentation and critical inquiry, and I’m excited to share them with the broader public once they are realized.
eSSENTIAALISMS
ESSENTIAL DIAGRAMS OF VIBRANCIES
indivisibility
White immeasurable presence
Bright Whitefarious light
Shiffing
WhiteBlack nickel, nickel of a night
Atmospheric
indivisibility
Incomprehensible
White pastoral
White indivisibility
visibility and indivisibility of the body
Nightfall of the spectral of deepended pains and depths of voluminous peeling,drying,violent light
angelic forms
This indivisibility, do they get the agency of bridging transcendental worlds?
Spectral dimensions
Inbetween measurabilities
Sensorial freedoms and their variants
Is this an attempt to keep them in memory?
Is anthropological empathy something that isn't lingual, isn't diversified in our understanding?
Would being be present even in the essence of time?
Non spatial time?
Of experience of an unconscious, calling?
Do they arrive amidst the darkness because their visibility is often witnessed in silence?
Is silence a form of indivisible color?
An invisible formless color
An indivisible space.
N
Objects
The vision of the color,
a sensorial attempt to keep them in memory.
Objects for the future
Indivisible body
Historical diagramatic body of knowledge
Nourished care-ful care”ing” bodies
The visual spectral and its narrative
It’s shadows
Its immeasurability to envelope and decenter the world
Floating landscapes
The formless maddeningly mercifully laugh at the white divisible “man”.
chance
How does chance occur?
I have been contemplating ideas around entropy and evolutionary progressions in different environmental bodies. Sensing into different bodies of consciousness, each with its unique sensory systems, essences, and biodiversity.
With the globalized commodification of resources the uprooting of these diverse indexical species continues to be homogenized and engineered to be cultivated based on our consumption practices.
This work addresses the dematerialization of extraction practices and rewilding our cities, our homes and our bodies with the idea of chance.
How did our elemental 5 senses come to be? How does the brain organize itself? How are cities organized? Are there overlaps in the way the brain organizes information and in the ways our cities inhabit anthropocentric programmatic needs?
And most importantly, would you like to play a game?
Image : ice dice
of impossible possibilities of the future.
Artists : Swati Jain x Grayson Cox
PLAYGROUND FOR MEASURING PRESENCE
“Design is a dense and ramified leveraging of the environment that makes possible the startling clarity of new observables, as well as enabling the transformation of apparently natural constants into manipulable variables required for constructing new worlds. Drawing out a language of scheming, crafting, and plotting.” - Hilan Bensusan
The universal petticoat of this Planetary game begins with a set of tools to unmeasure and remeasure time and space, at the local and universal scale. The Playground consists of a community of intentions, like tossing the ice dice (which themselves melt away each second, each side having possibilities of organizing the world a certain way as opposed to a different possibility based on which numbers we arrive at) and playing the combination seed species that get planted on the soil globe to represent the measured plant pieces in different abstracted planetary geo locations ;
“Seeds sowed like perished Suns”
Most measures of time are based on our “needs” or usefulness leading up to extraction practices and climate change. By approaching things from a playful curious perspective and measuring from an “other” perspective (or othering of a landscape) would help us reestablish our relationship with nature and think of new ways of dividing OR un-dividing time and space.
archaeological
specters
A way of looking at the way we do things so that this way of looking becomes its doing. - Derrida
I am interested in the idea of how immaterialities are expressed in different material forms through cultural progressions. How these cultural artifacts travel through time and colonial histories to different contexts and lose their essence in transition. My attempt through performative (rites and rituals) and visual interventions to to re enliven some of these essences through heuristic devices such as contemporary cultural dioramas (in digital, miniature craft based frames that accompany them in the museum space) to reveal their embodiment in the present time associations to a particular place and their potential to learn and unlearn from their past to build future narratives that are relevant to our contemporary practices, in an attempt of continuing dialogue. Their Religious significance belonging to a certain place and community limits new interpretations, ongoing progression and criticism due to the role it plays as identity building of groups of people. By disowning the flattened name tags in museums one can open up potentialities of widening imaginative landscapes in the western cultural institutions where they live and are witnessed today.
Some of the strategies I wish to experiment with to activate these proposed Diorama are through liminal sensorial spaces, sent based experiences of the time and place where this cultural body is transported from.
For these cultural experiences to be more emancipatory, I will be intervening in the linearity of these spatial dimensions, and manipulating their authentic venerated present lives and inserting the idea of a non place to their elemental present situation.
Documenting the local perspectives and lived experiences of a particular sound, a particular scent, a particular movement, a particular space and displacing their spatial-temporal dimension so to make the experience of the artifact that would be looked through this embodied looking glass more porous, in other words open to further dialogues and interpretations.
Non place
Non form
Non sound
Non temporal
Non spatial
Lost scent
Lost taste
Lost directionality
Dematerialise : Developing tools that actively participate in undoing, that can help us be indivisible. Undoing the world, through contemporary rituals to decolonize, depatriarchise, decapitalize essentialisms / built environments. To dematerialise by understanding the limits of immeasurability and multifaceted nature of cultural identities. To mobilize change through methods of transdisciplinary modalities of worldmaking / reshaping reality.
Healing haunted frameworks : (Re)manifesting essentialisms that transcend biases. Enenacting care practices by cultivating new futures by studying existing disparities in order to go towards an indivisible world, an equitable material future/culture.
New rituals, surgical cultural interventions (methods on local geographies) to produce new bodies of knowledge, towards an indivisible cultural landscape where a radically new possibility of exchange can be embodied to foster dialogue around equitable (shared) material futures.
Micro-Ritualistic Environments for de-colonial experiences at THE MET on cultural artifacts.
In doing so, the project hopes to offer a speculative curatorial direction, engaging exchange of different imaginative perspectives, new narrative, new meaning and forms of storytelling. Produces new rituals of coexistence for the displaced artifacts. Giving archeological agency to bodies and multicultural landscapes, while providing a unified sense of shared empathy in our histories.
Magic Realism through Rituals :
Rishi Mandal Yantra (traditional examples of diagram based portals/worlds)
- expansion and contraction of space through poetics or visual hypnotic diagrams of impossible possibilities of the future
Miniature domesticities for the divine ; doll house like - a way to bring play, care and reenactment of faith in everyday life and representation of self and the society.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TIME
Historical artifacts, particularly those acquired post-colonization and held by Western institutions, need to be unmeasured and ephemeralized. Since they carry with them the measured immeasurability of a cultural force. By re-manifesting these images through vernacular hypnotic diagramming of past cultural rites and rituals, we can open simultaneous worlds.
Acts of evoking the divine, such as creating decolonial dioramas, can resurrect displaced cultural artifacts through mythical diagrammatic vibrations, fostering devotion towards immaterial, non-human presences. The current project focuses on the Indian context, where idols undergo the process of Pran Pratishtha (“Pran” translates to “life”,” pratishtha” to “establish”) before being placed on the pedestal for worship in temples. Sthapana is the act of giving life to a non-being or material form, engaging the community in this process and establishing its being. Yantra (traditional examples of diagram based portals/worlds) would give us insights into local specificity into which they were born, consecrated, enlivened and maintained with acts of ritualistic devotional practices, providing a platform for sharing the divine reality of different cultures. This approach allows us to heal cultural heritages by exchanging perspectives on imagination, narrative, storytelling, form, function, and collective cultural exchange.
INTERVENTIONS :
YANTRA Rituals at the MET, miniature activation
artifacts, performances
CULTURAL SPECULATIVE CRITICISMS
INDIVISIBILITY / INVISIBILITY
Existence is formless (Advait Vedanta)
Everything is alive, when matter grows on it, it becomes visible, it becomes tangible.
I intend to use design as an impetus for social and environmental healing and an opportunity to propagate change by de-materialising sterilized interiorities, ephemeralizing structural constructs that perpetuate biases in order to go towards an indivisible equitable material future/culture.
Play of measuring the body into indivisibility
In this spatial inquiry, my method of doubt begins by measuring elemental specters ; spatial portals that allow individuals to explore the indivisibility / invisibility of their bodies so one can occupy the agency of working at a planetary scale of rearranging the planet and rewilding it with othering of different forms of beings. So one can undo themselves in order to take part in planetary design. It gives birth to a spectral figure who through movement can go invisible or atleast play with the perception of their bodies.
ARCHITECTURE OF SENT
Flower District
I am rearranging the flowers
I am rearranging the planet.
The scent of a landscape ; its journey and its presence amongst other species. The flower district in Manhattan, when the shops are closed at night or early morning, one can still smell and recognize the species, the landscape of flowers based on the sent based information. The Perishability of landscapes being imported and consumed from a particular place and time. The streets inhabit Living landscape since cut Flowers stay alive for 7-12 days, offering insights into the living aspects of these flowers. When Violet and pink Buddleia flowers are kept outside the storefronts, the bees come swarming and bussing by the sidewalks. Spatial Sent environments opening up layers of plant species dialogues - redesign propositions for species that interact with other species like bees to integrate multi-species inhabitants in local conditions. Through further interventions, revealing production infrastructures and inviting perspectives and new imaginations for what interior exteriorities or rather what exterior interiorities could look like.
Acts of Ephemeralization of space, inviting other species as collaborators to co-exist and rewild through planetary thinking. Perceiving walls around us are elemental, environmental, sonic, atmospheric and perpetually dissolving. Curating each flower species as an act of rearranging the planet ; an act of bringing more awareness.
These are performative ephemeral spaces, blend the threshold between inside and out, indoor domesticities to environmental landscapes, time and timelessness, measurable and immeasurable spaces. They can act as portals for performers and audiences to explore different frameworks of presence - indivisible / undivided space ; simultaneity / plurality / transience.
#sentscapes
Collective Kitchens
My mission is to sense sociocultural biases in our built environment through a transdisciplinary practice of documentation and rehearse sustainable design solutions for the future of our cities.
Visceral Foodscapes
Envisioning the kitchen as a genderless, undivided space, the 11 weeks of food performances would offer people agency by engaging with the materiality of food as a portal to building nourishing futures. Visceral foodscapes, when shared, lead to negotiations on taste preferences, smells, nutritional proportions, and enact different interpretations of ingredients among people from various backgrounds and cultures. This fosters a new understanding of their histories, flavors, and consumption practices, bridging food disparities and reinforcing horizontal food networks. It also introduces new avenues of care practices between communities. Food performances will also help us cultivate tools for shared cooking, laying the groundwork for research on collective kitchen prototypes.
“Language can determine things only by spatializing.” - Hilan Bensusan
Method of Dematerializing food - Innovative multicultural sent based cooking
Digital communal kitchens provide spaces where people can come together and nourish each other, thereby ungendering the space of the kitchen. By forging contemporary forms of labor around food, this approach seeks to dematerialize food through innovative, multicultural scent-based cooking and exploring spice landscapes (which are sourced from all parts of the world) in grocery stores around New York City.
Biases are local conditions. Exploring these conditions helps us unlearn and relearn. Reimaging until it matures itself to the condition of indivisibility.
Link to research : https://unownspace.com/Programming-Collectivity