Vaissnavi Shukl
On a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, I drove eastwards to the Old City of Ahmedabad to interview Avni Sethi at the Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict conceptualised by her and housed in a hundred-something year old building. This was only my second in person interview, so I was really excited to talk to her about being a cultural practitioner, who foregrounds the issues of caste violence and oppression that too in a city with a painful history of riots. We sat across each other with chai and biscuits and talked about their exhibits, their ongoing thematic inquiries, the function of repetition, public dissent, and the potential of museums and being institutions for dialogue, reconciliation and closure.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.

So we are sitting in ORDO right now, but describe the place next to us that’s Conflictorium.

Avni Sethi
That’s a really tough one. Because, you know, for the longest time when I used to speak about the Conflictorium, especially at a presentation, I would never be able to show images of the museum at a presentation. I would always just speak. Partly because I always thought that if you did a static image of the Conflictorium, you would only see emptiness all the time. And that best represents what Conflictorium does. So what I might end up doing now is create an auditory image, which I also don’t want to do, but the Conflictorium is about a hundred year old building now set in Mirzapur which is in the older part of Ahmedabad. And we necessarily call ourselves a “Museum of Conflict”. And I’m revealing the kind of doubt that we’re playing with a lot at this point of time as a team, is are we a building? and if we weren’t a building then what would the Conflictorium be? And so you’re asking me this question at a difficult juncture to describe it. It’s difficult. It’s a museum that hopes to have dialogue and have conversations with people who may be different from each other. Somehow be able to be a host between people who see each other as “the other”.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Okay, we are talking about Conflictorium, which is either a programme or a building. So we’re…we’re open ended. But the Conflictorium in this case, is a proper noun. It is not a building typology. So even though we wish it was a building, typology that would constantly address themes of conflict or violence, it is not per say a generic institution like a hospital or a police station or our Community Centre for that matter. It is a museum at the…at the very basis or crux of it. Talk us through what a ‘Museum of Conflict’ is, and how you crossed paths with the idea. 

Avni Sethi
Yeah, I actually think that a Museum of Conflict in a city like Ahmedabad would be inevitable. Either it would be me or somebody else. Either it would be in 2003 or 2013, but it would have had to happen. Ahmedabad has seen in the last decade or maybe even two decades, severe tectonic shifts in its social fabric, in how much… how much pressure has been put on its… on its tensility. I think as a as a young person growing up in Ahmedabad, but if you have seen the kind of violence that has ensued in the last twenty years, and in any way if you… if you were witness to how it was structurally being in place inculcated into every public institution into public space into…into imaginations of citizenship, into what education can look like, then it was not possible to just stay witness from a distance, the weight of being witness is very high. It’s difficult to look at yourself in the mirror, when you’ve been witness to something like this in an ongoing way. You have to respond. You have to either respond within yourself or you have to respond outside. And I think the Museum of Conflict in that sense, was a response to precisely the kind of violence that this city is capable of. And maybe now the country is or the world is… or the world is capable of, and increasing the tempo of every single day that we go past. So in that sense, I think, it was … there’s a sher that Sahir Ludhianvi saying,
“Khoon phir khoon hai, tapakta hai toh jam jaata hai. Zulm phir zulm hai, badhta hai toh tham jaata hai” (Blood is still blood, if it drips, it dries. Torture is still torture, if it increases, it stops.)

So that’s the nature of violence, it will have to cease when it increases. It’s also in the hope of that…That it will have to seize and we will have to do whatever it takes in whatever sphere, for it to cease. So in that sense, the Museum of Conflict in only an attempt to say, how does one visible-ise some of this violence, for those who are implicated within the violence? Because those who suffer the violence don’t need any showing, they see it, it’s their lives. It’s really in the name of whom the violence is performed, on behalf of whom the violence is performed who have the privilege then to not even see it, to not even acknowledge that it occurs. Now the gap between those who suffer it and those… those who sanction it, the gap is so large. The meeting place, the common ground, doesn’t exist. So as civil society or civic beings or people who have a heart it only makes sense to be able to find those spaces.

Vaissnavi Shukl
This… This ties very well into what I was going to lead with after but  …So in the Conflictorium there are various spaces where kind of the museum challenges the viewers to face incidents of violence and conflict not explicitly, but even implicitly in that sense. Now, one would assume that with every conflict there arises a need for confrontation first, and then acceptance and maybe eventually resolution or reconciliation. So knowing that the function of museums as you know institutions that showcase remnants of a remote or a near past, without the burden of providing a safe place where other more difficult conversations can happen, how do you see the Conflictorium in a city like  …like Ahmedabad? We have quite a shameful history in that sense. So how do you position it as not just a place where you confront the shameful history but also in some  …some ways I don’t want to use the word closure but kind of come to terms with whatever has  …has happened.

Avni Sethi
When you’re right that the museum in a sense, never took no responsibility at all. In fact, in its moment of origin, is actually a place where loot is on display, where Imperial conquest is in full view for its own subjects to take pride in. Now, from that point of view, what is then our reason to hang on to that nomenclature, or that category of wanting to be a museum in the first place. In this shameful history that you’re talking about, there’s a large question of how state narratives are produced, propagated, media-tised and multiplied many many folds and how they begin to have certain kinds of legitimacies. The state has certain tools or infrastructures to produce narratives and convert them into legitimate narratives. Now what are these infrastructures? What are these tools that the state has? And there’s a list of those, including textbooks, museums of course, public policy, the law, legislation, these are all tools to which narratives are constructed or a sense of identity, a sense of history is actually produced in the here and now, constant. The amount of resources a state has and the amount of monopoly has over violence, no civic being can match that. And I think that’s precisely where there is a possibility of doing something. That the state produces large images,  I think as artists and cultural practitioners, we have the ability of producing very snake images, which actually even if the state tries it cannot do, it can only talk about seven million people, three million people. I think as people, as citizens, as artists, we have the ability to talk about three people, we have the ability to talk about ten people. And then what happens to the museum? What happens to ten people meeting in a space that you call a museum? What happens if you only require, you know, small room with a roof on top to come together and talk about the violence that has happened or continues to happen? You suddenly say that we don’t need your infrastructure. We don’t need large support to be able to produce our own narratives, or to propagate narratives of those who have been in suffering. It is really in the smallness of the infrastructure that is like a little  …like when the peepal tree grows from inside a concrete building for many years. You see many of those peepal tree plants growing through the Conflictorium. It’s also an incredible thing of how large narratives or large infrastructures can get punctured. The rupture has great potential. And I feel like in the city like Ahmedabad, that’s the only way to confront the technologies of the state, is to actually build solidarity, to build conversations, to cross the lines of segregation that are so carefully constructed within the newest policies that are coming up. So for example, we have the low income areas that come up  …like low income housing, areas that are demarcated in the urban plan for the city. With as much debate that’s available in the world on this. common sense is that if you further segregate those that are low income and those that have all the resources, you’re going to segregate them at the level of public parks, you’re going to segregate the level of education, where are we going to meet anybody who’s different than us? Now, this may be low income to start with, but that “segregation project” is complete when it comes down to we will segregate based on religion, we will segregate based on caste. So, the “segregation project”, is the most frontal project in the mind of the state, whereas that is its job is probably exactly the opposite. Now, therefore, small museums, attempting to generate narratives in history, I think it’s important that not one museum, but many such spaces come alive. So the museum is sometimes I feel like it’s  …it’s a prototype. It’s a prototype to say that something is possible, and that many people will pass by it and know that the possibility exists and will be able to give it form in a different space, maybe through poetry, maybe through dance, maybe through publication, maybe podcasts, but we’ll know that there is a possibility of puncturing that grand meta narrative that the state use of oneness.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Kind of taking the prototype and kind of waiting for it to become an archetype of replication, of multiplication.

Avni Sethi
Yeah. We’re working on our next thematic inquiry that deals with this question. The difference between what the state does and what people’s movements can do. We are trying to work on this difference and articulating it as what the state does is reproduction of a spectacle. So the state reproduces the spectacle of violence, again and again, but only reproduces it. What people’s movements have the  …have the grit and energy and numbers for is repetition. We can again and again and again repeat the quest for justice. We can repeat the quest for equality. And we can repeat it through image, through the nara again, there is one nara, we can repeat it again and again and again. And the two must not be confused as the other that reproduction does one thing and repetition does the other. So sometimes, in all the critique that one comes up of our own practice, you know, one of the critiques that internally as a team that we may speak about or have spoken about is, “Are we doing the same thing again and again?” And we’re like, “Hell, yeah, we are doing the same thing again and again”, because the state is reproducing the same violence again and again, and therefore what else do we have to talk about? So it’s not like we’re a commercial gallery or an art centre, who wants to talk about the clouds on one day and then talk about social justice projects on it and then wants to talk about sunflowers on the third day. We have really very little space for doing that, especially if we are committed to this idea that the museum is a space that will generate a conversation that will become where those who have been deliberately silenced or not heard, this is where, if they choose to speak, they can speak. Then I think there is very little doubt in terms of what will be repeated.

Vaissnavi Shukl
If there’s any particular installation, or exhibit that you would want to talk about, kind of exemplify just the premise that you mentioned, what would you pick?

Avni Sethi
I would say that all the exhibits actually do the same thing. They really speak of the same thing. They arrive … They just arrived there through different doors. So for example, if I talk about the last thematic inquiry, which was called ‘fabricating love and other states’, we were trying to examine, what is this  …What is love? What is love? It’s also because it’s so difficult to talk about it at present in our present political context, but also that love is so difficult to talk about in the context of culture practice. We have had enough iterations that tell us what love looks like whether it’s our films, especially Hindi films, Bollywood films, which are rampant and we know how much influence they have on this part of the country, on the psyche, on how we imagined relationships, television, literature. All these sites have many, many examples, or many instances of how they are shaped our… shaped our imagination of how we should think of them. If for a second, we could put that aside of how we receive these images. We wanted to examine what can  ….what can look like, or what are the instances that we will choose to talk about. For me that’s personally been a very special inquiry. So it ranged from producing a film called ‘Sabarmati and It’s Lovers’, where we were examining what is this new design of the Sabarmati Riverfront, that has in fact allowed for increased number of suicides between lovers. There’s something intrinsic in that design that allows or enables to do that. Is that a facet of love that we allow ourself to think? And that  …that came to us because within a neighbourhood itself in the last 10 years, we have witnessed at least three couples who have died by suicide because they belong to different caste, different communities and because they were not accepted they decided to end their lives. What does it look like when, when lovers belong to different castes? And this is a larger reality of, of this country? What are our social reality, allowing us to imagine of our lives? So an exhibition like that became a site to have our films buying a couple and more recently with filmmakers come from the Dalit community, finding mainstream space and really actually making the space for their work, really give us like this incredible reminder of limited our popular culture has has been and how we imagine our world.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And also in terms of just the art of filmmaking, those narratives are then just so nuanced, and the perspective that everything is narrated from or short from kind of shakes you up to the core. I believe you’re talking about Nagraj Manjule. Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Avni Sethi
So actually, if I think about all the exhibitions we’ve ever done, we either… either trying to understand the caste, either trying to understand gender, either trying to understand religion and we only keep doing. Now, you know, the other day, someone who used to come to the museum initially when it opened and then stopped coming in and I met her at an exhibition opening, and said, you know, “I don’t see you anymore”. She said, “Yeah. But you only always are talking about caste.” I said, okay, we only did two exhibitions about caste but does it look like anything in the world has changed? So we have to keep talking about it till the time it exists. So you’re  …you’re exhausted of seeing this, but your realities Yeah, but you’re not exhausted of actually practising it.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Speaking of installation, there’s another installation of yours that our intern, Ayushi, found very interesting. So I’m going to relay the question from her, you have something called the conflict timeline, where you’ve kind of parallely juxtaposed the history of riots or violence in the city with parallely the kind of development that was happening in the city and she’s a young architect, so there’s I’m not surprised this comes from her. She’s saying that she found it very interesting how, you know, they kind of overlap, same time both things are happening almost kind of diametrically opposite in nature. And we are the country’s first world heritage city. There’s a lot of like architectural wealth in the city. And we will look at the timeline of the riots and of these prominent buildings. It makes us question how and if there was any consideration given to the contemporary social unrest, while these buildings were designed and built. So Ayushi asks if there should be any consideration given to the socio-political climate by designers when they are practising in a certain era. And if yes, then how can we do so especially with so many conflicting groups in the same broad picture? 

Avni Sethi
I think I’m very clear that designers and architects are acting completely in cognizance of social political realities. They are absolutely visible-ising through material-form use the very primal instinct of violence that exists in Indian society. Let’s look at the kind of state projects that are coming up. What is this new typology that the Indian state is sanctioning? It’s hyper-masculine, it is larger than life, there’s lots of concrete. There’s no absolute space for fragility, absolutely no space without being vulnerable. What is the material that see the Indian State representing us through? It’s concrete. That says something about how architects are completely enviewed in a social political reality, in fact, are only making it or giving it a visible form. So I would not treat them in the first place as innocent or as I wouldn’t think of them as designing in studios and unaware of what may be happening outside. I would say that either they are a product of what is happening outside and therefore choosing politics when they choose to design and who they design for. Now, if you’re asking me whether architects, designers, policymakers should have a spine. Yes they do. I’m also aware that for every very very large project, the way they dismantle it is through several very small projects. I don’t think that the methods that the state uses are the methods that we need to use as citizens or counter it. Very famously said that you can dismantle your oppressors home with the same tools as the oppressor. So the tools will have to be different, the language will have to be different, it can’t be the same.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s almost like saying you can’t heal in the environment that made you sick. But if you were to do it differently, I mean, I wrote my thesis kind of looking at how the Central Vista project, all the entries that they had received the six centuries, how each architecture firm was pandering to a different vision of what Hindu nationalism is, or what nationalism is which by default right now is in the nationalism and it trickles down to using of lotuses and one proposal on facades of buildings or having this idea of a utopian Mughal garden on Rajpath, all different versions of it and for some reason I do see that art or being an artist allows you a certain kind of liberty that maybe a profession like architecture doesn’t necessarily, I don’t know if it has to do with the question of scale. But in a world where architects or designers would have had the agency to do it differently, what could that difference look like? Especially for state sponsored projects.

Avni Sethi
Yeah I really find it difficult to imagine that the resolution of this is in the doing, it’s actually in the being, it’s in the choices that one makes. Actually in your question, I feel like there’s some things that are embedded. Like at what scales are we prepared to work at. We in our need to have certain architectural prowess agree and believe that an entire river should be locked into two sides of concrete. Does our humanness allow us to think of rivers like that? Within our humanness as architects or designers, do we think of a 150-200 year old tree as dispensable because that’s what the design demands? So I really think that the question of doing things differently, it’s attached to how much of our humanness are we ready to trade in the pursuit of good design? If designers just agreed to stay human much more than having architecture feat accomplished. I think that’s doing things differently.

Vaissnavi Shukl
On a… on a slightly brighter note for our final question. I know now you’ve just entered the tenth year of the Conflictorium and in one way you celebrated it by opening another one in Raipur. So talk us through what is planned for the year about the new Conflictorium and just what’s next for you and the Conflictorium? 

Avni Sethi
That is right. We have entered our tenth year here on the 14th of April, this year, and we did open a Conflictorium in Raipur. And Raipur, Chhattisgarh like I said this is a very different context than I think for us, being able to put together that museum started and hopefully run it for some time has really been about testing whether what we say is a methodology essentially, that the Conflictorium is a method of being able to have conversation to be able to hold space for dialogue. If we believe that let’s test, is it possible to go to a different context? Meet people who live there who we want to own this and have this conversation, anchor it? And I think we did. We met incredible people in Raipur, young people who are excited about having conversation about disagreeing with the way the world functions around them, and somehow able to do something and I think that affirms something about this method that we have just a sense of, and I’m saying this after ten years of doing this work, that we only have a sense of it. Its still very difficult to articulate. What is it exactly that we are doing? Can you make templates out of this? I’m not sure that it’s a template. But I know that within that methodology, there is some amount of empathy that’s written into how we begin to approach the situation. And I think, Raipur or the opening in Raipur affirms some of that, in the sense that, there is something in the methodology that may be working. And so we will go wherever we are invited next. Every once in a while we get an email from a visitor who’s come from another city, saying, “I live in so and so city’. I remember this email particularly, “I live in Nagpur. And it would have been very different if there was the Conflictorium in Nagpur while I was growing up. Will you ever consider opening one in Nagpur.” And for me, I think that imitation very seriously, it’s not just an email from a visitor that was moved. For me, that’s a legitimate invitation saying, come to this city and so whoever is writing that next, we try really hard to muster up sources to make it happen. But we’re also playing a playground with… our playground is resource-deficit playground because of the nature of the world. And I don’t want to make this a complaint about how resources function in the world. We know precisely why they function in this way. Young people, old people, people who want to not live the way they have been living, people want to have conversations, I think anybody who wants to make an invitation, I think we’ll go. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So here’s hoping that the Conflictorium is not just a prototype but also becomes an archetype. Thank you so much for doing this in person more than anything, I think, while it’s great joy to constantly meet people who are doing interesting work and speak to them, there’s beauty in sitting across your face and seeing your emotions and seeing the beautiful space that you’ve built. Thank you so much.

Avni Sethi
Thank you. Thank you for this conversation. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.