Practising Darkness

What does it mean to see and to be seen in the settler-colonial present that choreographs its violence under the visual regime of the atrocity image? How does poetry construct the site of the negative and assemble spectral topographies in language? What constitutes an ethic of absence as we are forced to inhabit the rubble of speech? Could we turn to the world of the dead to generate counteraesthetic gestures that refuse being legible to our oppressors?

This talk by Shivangi Mariam Raj reflects on these questions by bringing together approaches in architecture, literature, photography, translation, and political geography. It orients us towards the furrowed uncertainty of the dark and examines how light imposes its imperialist control by defining, classifying, sanitising, and civilising everything it touches. The talk flits between the space of an eclipse and the space of an ellipsis to sculpt silence into an alternative temporality of “flea time.”

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Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer and culture worker born in India. As an independent researcher, she is interested in visual cultures of imperialist and colonial violence across South Asia and West Asia, language as the site of caste apartheid in India, and spectral temporalities as forms of resistance in Kashmir. She utilises essays, poetry, and reportage for individual memory to coalesce into a broader inquiry of the politics of public remembering. She is the 2024–25 Editorial Fellow for Logic(s) Magazine at INCITE Center of Columbia University, and the recipient of Graham Foundation’s 2024 grant for research for her project, “Shadow Thresholds: Architecture of Ruin in India.” Her work with The Funambulist focuses on the politics of space and bodies.

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Last week to see Valentina Triet’s exhibition Of manners, of trips. On the day of the talk, the exhibition will be open from 12 to 4 pm. Shivangi Mariam Raj’s talk will be in English.