“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

― Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucen







nspace



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.

My philosophical inquiries focus on sociocultural, ecological, and multisensory approaches to foster collective empathy and indivisible futures.

The following spatial interventions are Environmental and Cultural Embodiments, with playful elemental measuring apparatus to measure and unmeasure different landscapes



You can read my recent work on the links below :

Long Essay

Short Essay


Please reach out to me at

swati@unownspace.com

for suggestions, collaborations and inquiries!  








Feminist and decolonial perspective

I have been thinking of spatial research in a porous and expansive way, embodying past, present and future ecological, cultural and representational landscapes. borrowing from indigenous histories, present cultural practices to speculate eco-conscious sites for interconnectedness of beings.

Levinas understands the passing of time as being the very presence of the Other. Time is whatever witnesses the vulnerability of the Indexicalism present, as something else is always to come; the present is in the future’s hands.

I suppose being a migratory species, I am always curious about where things really come from? What kind of stories we engaged in the past and what stories do we want to tell in the future? I have been investigating 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 un-measure, re-wild and retell these atmospheric conditions using performative, ritualistic, and craft-based approaches from a feminist and decolonial perspective. Revisiting cultural practices to create new ways for communities to explore multidimensional identities and agencies through contemporary technology and reconstitution of imaginative landscapes.

The Greeks had a geography for the borders of a position. They understood the horizon as a river, circumscribing where we are. The indexical river was present whenever they were thinking about being and appearances.

Ephemeral Phenomenologies and the movement of various environmental bodies (human, non-human, and other elemental species) in time and space through archaeological and ecological spatial orders. I seek to address planetary biases and advocate for the liberation of material histories and ecologies to address the climate crisis. Staging new encounters such as an invisible spectral spatial state, decolonial dioramas for the MET, planetary game designs for un-measuring the city, and collective kitchens. **My aim is to re-wild our bodies, homes, and the built environment through these new forms of spatial narratives. These projects represent a blend of creative experimentation and critical inquiries.


indivisibility

Precarious fragile spectrometer of presence and absence. Of a certain present day history traced through field recordings that stand at the edge of visibility and indivisibility.  Within the framework of various rasas. Emotional states of refraction.  The act of playing them to process their entanglements through different states of being - The archival of different spectral states of spatial formulations of space and time, their state of presence and make way for contemplating absence/specter bias, grief, care, love, humor and presence within them to extrapolate new contemporary narratives. 

Social Justice strategies to inculcate abundance. To think in spectral terms (than in singular forms of monotonous conceptual frameworks) for a humane rhythmic life of variation in physiological states and experience of a “gharana” to pass into new hybridized liminal states of creating a whole.

Gaia must make room for the sundry different ways of living (in) the Anthropocene, since the Earth’s space-time-energy overall configuration thus named is refracted and diffracted in many directions.

Arènes, Latour, and Gaillardet (2018) observe in their recent paper on “Gaia-graphy”—an anamorphic refiguration of the planet as seen “from the inside” rather than from the usual view from outer space—the Earth itself “is much more concrete, dynamic, complex, heterogeneous and reactive than what can be captured through the cartographic imaginary of points defined on a map by longitude and latitude.” To which we might add the macrotemporal heterogeneity of the Earth, its geologically unceasing becoming-other.

Anthropocene-thinking requires the practice of a radical form of ontological pluralism, both on the side of anthropology—the attention to the many ways of living and thinking the Anthropocene by different peoples in different places, differently affected by capitalism’s processes of material extraction and spiritual sorcery—and on the side of the ecological, biological, and geophysical sciences—unearthing the “different Earths”; mapping out of different zones of ecological simplification; re- cording the sometimes surprising unintentional effects of bio-, socio-, and geo-engineering actions on the part of states and corporations; developing the new insights about the multifarious symbiotic interdependence of all life-forms.

Perception : What forces of presence derive absence? 

Everything is alive
When matter grows on it 
It becomes visible
It becomes tangible.

Perception is itself a collection of acts of measurement that can only make sense from an interiority, from a standing location. The exterior, the outer, the Outdoors are effectively components of an interiority, which is a unit of transcendence assembled by deictic operations.

Spectral Architecture

This image that comes from a scent a place to the image that becomes a place to the image that becomes an act, a ritual, a habit, a practice, a being, to bring more and more flesh to it, to bring more and more life to it, to bring more and more place to it, to bring more and more language to it in liminal forms.

  • Liminal Myth-o-spheres
  • Multisensory Spaces, Sentscapes etc. 
  • Rhizospheres - bliss, happy, grief, knowledge, curiosity, formulations, delight, wonder
  • Spectre Spaces (of absence)
  • Archival frameworks of programmatic biases

Architecture of a spectral threshold of indivisibility between visible and invisible states, that allows for exploration of spectral states of being. Spectral architecture crafts liminal myth-o-spheres while exploring multisensory design strategies, including scentscapes. Function : These spectre spaces enable archiving decolonial experiences to embody ecological and cultural landscapes of healing, care, and belonging.






   

archaeological 
specters



Lecture Transcripts (link)

Parsons School of Design, November 2024

Which eco-cultural stories get told?
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 is 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 and emotional significance belonging to a certain place and community which limits new interpretations, ongoing progression and criticism due to the role it actively 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 porous framework, 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

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, equitable material future/culture.

A way of looking at the way we do things so that this way of looking becomes its doing. -  Derrida

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.

eSSENTIAALISMS



ESSENTIAL DIAGRAMS OF VIBRANCY

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

Case study : 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 & PRACTICES

Horticulture of time 

Gestures in motion 

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.

It is no longer a question of instituting a serial organization of the imaginary, but instead a symbolic and structural order of understanding. It is no longer a question of graduating resemblances, ultimately arriving at an identification between Man and Animal at the heart of a mystical participation. It is a question of ordering differences to arrive at a correspondence of relations. The animal is distributed according to differential relations or distinctive oppositions between species; the same goes for human beings, according to the groups considered. When analyzing the institution of the totem, we do not say that this group of people identifies with that animal species. We say that what group A is to group B, species A' is to species B'. This method is profoundly different from the preceding one: given two human groups, each with its totem animal, we must discover the way in which the two totems entertain relations analogous to those between the two groups— the Crow is to the Falcon...

CULTURAL SPECULATIVE CRITICISMS

INTERVENTIONS  : YANTRA Rituals at the MET, miniature activation, artifacts, performances

Casts shadows : which eco-cultural stories get told in cultural institutions today? 

Research into cultural memory as an artifact toward the design of the cultural institutes of the future. Cultural ecologies manifested in spatial diagrammatic motifs. Mapping sound narrative and iconographic/visual research of historical artifacts and manuscripts as they are practiced today. 

“The encyclopedic knowledge stored in the myth-maker’s culture and language”.

“His point of departure is that language is primarily neither a tool for representing things nor a device to cope with the world by performative acts. Rather, it is an opening to the Other.”

Reinterpretation of cultural artifacts in western museums through multicultural storytelling.

Heritage conservation by stitching decolonial narratives that need to be re-archived, reoriented, rekindled. Museum hospitality to record and invite new ritualistic time based spatial embodiments. Contemporary forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Contemporary forms of timekeeping and cultural motifs morphed from fragile precarious states of ecological transformations, Tracing Evolutionary changing landscapes, new species - mapping past natural bodies from present and speculating future bodies and cultural resonances. New historical motifs of regenerative cultural ecologies to stand the test of time. New forms of future craft techniques, informed by decarbonized and non extractive time based embodiments in that historical border zone (donna)

If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident that the Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary or local stability (with the highest number of dimensions possible under the circumstances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becoming, but it also carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of multiplicities always farther down the line of flight. (Moby-Dick is the White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic Term of the Alliance;

creating an energetic, eventful forensic zone – a cascading stellar event or perhaps a mobile principle; or perhaps something circuit-like, tubular, intestinal, a broken ouroborous!

Cultural Design Tools
  • Indigenous storytelling
  • Cultural & Mythological narrative beings
  • Ritualistic Spatial Practices
  • Narrative Materialities
  • Mythopoesis
  • Identity-Graphs
  • Allegorical Landscapes
  • Designing Cosmologies
  • Cultural Public Totems
  • Cultural Massing in Museums
  • De-colonizing Ecologies through Design Strategies

Cosmological StoryTelling Spatial Device : Designing a multicultural sonic façade / curation tool for museums by investigating indigenous mythological narratives, symbologies, and methodologies from past ontological worlds to transmit unity through contemporary design. This includes creating spatial identity graphs that trace eco-cultural vibrations from archaeological artifacts that are situated in western museums today. While exploring sonic and ritualistic time based spatial practices employing decolonizing strategies and narrative materialities. This approach enables multicultural storytelling, transforming museums into dynamic spaces where cultural objects play a vital role in activating eco-cultural porosity, fostering knowledge production, and promoting active engagement.

“It is intrinsically geared towards the Great Outdoors because it is shaped by dialogue, by conversation, by the need to say something to someone else.”


INTERVENTIONS  :
YANTRA Rituals at the MET, miniature activation
artifacts, performances












CULTURAL SPECULATIVE CRITICISMS




 










ARCHITECTURE OF SENT


Flower District ; INTERSPECIES COLLABORATION

I am rearranging the flowers

I am rearranging the planet.

The scent of a landscape ; its journey and its presence among other species. 

The flower district in Manhattan, when the shops are closed during night hours or whee in the morning, one can smell and recognize the species without seeing them, the landscape of flowers based on the sent alone. 

The Perishability of landscapes being imported and consumed from a particular place and time. 

They say cut Flowers stay alive for 7-12 days, the streets inhabit these Living landscapes offering insights into the living aspects of these flowers. A lot of them bloom one a year or sometimes even once in 10 years. The market becomes a place of keeping up with these ecological time cycles and embracing different transformations. The Violet and Pink Buddleia flowers kept outside the storefronts calls in bees to pollinate and discreetly buzz by the sidewalks alongside humans.

Spatial Sent environments opening up layers of plants and other species dialogues - redesign propositions for species that interact with other species like bees with flowers to integrate multi-species inhabitants in local urban conditions. Through further interventions, revealing production infrastructures and inviting perspectives and new imaginations for what interior exteriorities or rather what exterior interiorities could offer in the process of rewilding them.

Living beings, insofar as they are alive, are a becoming. 

Rewilding the urban

Acts of Ephemeralization of space, inviting other species as collaborators to co-exist and rewild through planetary thinking. Perceiving walls around us as 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 become performative ephemeral spaces, blend the threshold between inside and out, indoor domesticities to environmental landscapes, time and timelessness, measurable and immeasurable spaces. They act as portals for performers and audiences to explore different frameworks of simultaneity, plurality and transience.




PLAYGROUND FOR MEASURING PRESENCE


Let's say there is an Ecological monopoly that counters techno-capitalist frameworks of nature on your study table. You get to do a Cartographic mapping of Extractive measures in the form of a microclimate of a place yourself.

Measurement appears as a deictic exercise, measurement is situated. It follows that measurement is an event (or a series of events) amid other events that take place only with reference to other events.

World-making game design to observe micro environmental climates, propose playful environmental revolutions through land stewardship, interspecies collaboration and learnings from biomimicry. 

“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

Or if this model is actually your grocery store. Can wayfinding sensory activations around ethnic ingredients we find on the shelves of our grocery stores and flower markets allow us to trace measured ecologies for sale and begin to wonder upon the forms of abundant nature we borrow from everyday. Part of a global network of cultivations and belongings. 

This location being given­ – ­ given the circumstances of measurement­ – ­ it becomes evident how measurement ought to be done. Once there is a diversity of measurement alternatives, Whitehead recommends that we consult what indicates the peculiarities of the (situated) experience. Such indications are relative to a locus standi. Measurement is relative to the point from which perceptual experience takes place.

Decarbonizing our everyday life through play in microenvironments and everyday life. Sowing seeds for rewilding our bodies, minds and built environments. If we could live with these radical forms of honesty in our play and dialect, it would only help us grow an interesting relationship with gaia. 

Playground for measuring presence 

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 (seeds) 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 species, or a landscape) would help us reestablish our relationship with nature and think of new ways of dividing OR un-dividing ecological time and space.

Ecological Design Tools
  • Planetary Design
  • Geo-Forms
  • Biomimicry Research
  • Interspecies Collaborative Research
  • Empirical measurabilities
  • Urban Sensing
  • Spatial Mapping and its politics / poetics
  • Urban Interventions

What environmental and domestic landscapes do we unmeasure? 

Playscapes : I conduct research at both micro and macro planetary scales, incorporating geo-forms, biomimicry, and interspecies collaborative studies to develop sustainable objects and spaces. For example, A planetary game based on our Lenapehoking land that examines the colonial and capitalistic frameworks of natural ecologies that live on the shelves of our grocery stores measured and packaged to their contents, the game helps us unmeasure these domesticated material genealogies.

A playscape designed to unmeasure ecological narratives.






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?

of impossible possibilities of the future.

The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logical order to this string, these crossings or transformations. It is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy

The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers' drawings on this plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them.

Artists : Swati Jain x Grayson Cox



immeasurability


What environmental and domestic landscapes do we need to un-measure?

After the measurability of the landscape the game continues by measuring the visual Immeasurability of invisible forces on a carpeted platform, the static between two bodies, an attempt to measure immeasurable dimensions of space and time, propelling new Spatial metaphors, playful ephemeral tool of enquiry to rewild our built environment with collective curiosities around the invisible and indivisible forces at play.

A tool to measure the air in soil, a tool to measure dust in air, a tool to measure air in sea or a tool to measure moisture in air? Measuring time in space, measuring space in time. 


Artists : Swati Jain x Grayson Cox

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.


                                                                  Swati Jain Eco-cultural Practice     swati@unownspace.com octaoctaocta.com