Vaissnavi Shukl
I saw Ateya Khorakiwala’s work for the first time last year. She presented parts of Ateya Khorakiwala’s doctoral research that focused on grain silos in India and how they were a post-colonial import – built not just for the purpose of creating food security after witnessing one of the worst famines in the country but also to serve as a currency for exchange. This commodification of grains came loaded with questions about its storage infrastructure. Particularly with silos becoming political and economic instruments to manage the supply of grains. In today’s conversation, Ateya talks about the history of silos, its construction materials and her course Feasting and Fasting at Columbia University.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

We’ll begin by talking about your work, first on silos. So before we get into that, I thought we’ll take a quick stock of where the idea of silos or where silos as these large containers, buildings elements, whatever you want to call it came to India. The first instance was… before even getting there… I was wondering while reading your work, so before silos came to India as a result of the Bengal Famine which were gifted by the Americans to India. What was the infrastructure, what were the different ways in which grain storage was done?

Ateya Khorakiwala
Hi Vaissnavi. Good morning…Maybe that’s not…whenever people hear this. Thank you for asking me all these questions. Thank you for reading all of my work. I am excited to talk to you about it today. I hope I can tie together some of the strands of you know architectural thinking and economic thinking and grain and some of the things that how the landscape itself has been transformed in relation to the history of famine. This is something I’m very passionate about and interested in. I think the question you just asked me was a question of if we think of silos as a post colonial intervention in preventing or addressing shortages in grain… shortages in food in how states in general, address the problem of how food will reach consumers, then, what are ways that the same problem was addressed and other political economies. I think the silo has a very specific kind of intervention, and we can talk about that a little bit more. The larger question here is what needed to happen so that food, food grains become a kind of problem of the state. What needed to happen so that… so that first of all, there becomes a separation between  where grain is produced and where it is consumed. And then what needs to happen so that food can move from the point of production to the point of consumption, which is to say that one of the things that I was really fascinated by is this idea that ‘x is the granary of y’. An example of that might be Punjab or someplace is the granary of England. And what that means… and that phrase if you look in archival documents, you know, in reports and things, when does that particular model of phrasing emerge that one place is supplying all of the food needs of another place. Now, there are two parts to this history, but one is that it reflects the specialisation of land that we must think about certain parcels of land that are productive only in specific ways. So if some land has some kind of soil that it should only grow, the one thing that is really good at…or that if it has some climate, then it should really only grow the one thing that that place is perfect for growing, which is a very modern way of thinking about agriculture, as opposed to an idea that a piece of land is there to serve, not an economy in general, but a smaller, bounded regional need or local need. And so that then creates a separation between where things will be produced and where they will be consumed. The other part of this is that it led to an increasingly anxious set of debates in many different places. So in England itself, there’s this debate that’s happening in the 18th century, that, “Oh my god, we’re now dependent on grain from outside. What will happen if somehow that connection gets severed? How will we feed our population?” This is precisely what happened in the early part of World War…in the early part of World War Two, when India’s relationship to Berma, Myanmar got served. And suddenly there is a precipitous decline in the amount of rice that you are able to import. So on the one hand, that particular colonial model of political economy produces this thing that we now understand as ‘x is the granary of y’ uses that kind of separation, but it also produces a kind of anxiety about that separation that makes you kind of nationalist and state interest in managing agricultural production. So you see, there’s a kind of double movement that happens as a result of that particular political economy. So the answer to your question is that this silo which we can think of not as a physical object, but as a model of who stores what, emerges, which in this case it would really be warehouses, which were put into governments actually managing their warehouses and the storing of grain, emerges as a result of this double move. One, that we need to produce food in large quantities to feed increasingly urban  populations in various places around the world; armies, all sorts of new bodies of people who exist in ways that are responding to colonial pressures, pressures of mobility, of responding to new urban economies, etc. And on the other, this rising nationalist fervour that we should not be dependent on outsiders. Does that make sense? Did I get to…

Vaissnavi Shukl
My question, however, is so if you think about grains and food and the traditional barter systems around which food or grains became the central object or good off trade, so for example, in your essay and you refer to what Amartya Sen called the ‘exchangeable entitlement’, right, where they say farmers in Bengali would receive rice in exchange for their labour, or even when you look at the monarchies back in the day or the kings which ruled, you know they would always ask for grain as a tax, like a mode of controlling tax, like Lagaan and all the movies that came after that. The idea of having grains as a valuable commodity that before the idea of money came in was used to exchange services or goods or even get tax from different subjects of the state. You think the introduction of silos somewhere changed the notion of grains as something that could be used as a commodity for exchange and then translated into a commodity that had to be stored for specific reasons. Do you think there was a shift in… shift in the idea of what grain was, as something that is way beyond a food item. And something that exists largely in the economy as different things at different points in time.

Ateya Khorakiwala
That is a fascinating question and a fascinating set of ideas that you have pulled out, which is that what is the relationship between grain as something we consume and something we eat and destroy, and money, which is something that is extremely stable, when you use money you don’t destroy money. Everything else that we use, that most of the other things that the word consumption has consume because…exactly, and consumption of course will become the word that will define how we relate to commodities in general you know consumer commodities. So the question, in a sense, is about what… in what ways does grain play this double role. One, as a representation of money? Because all money needs some form of representation, right? If you look at bank notes, it is a representation of an idea, it’s a currency in some way. Yes. And it is, in a sense, a representation of a contract of debt. That I owe you something. I give you this note and the note guarantees that you can consume the value of that money. Money is one of the few things that you can use and it doesn’t get destroyed. Somebody else can take that money and it circulates. Grain has to do this double role, it has to function both as cash and gold as an object. When you… when you choose grain as tax, I won’t call that barter, I would call that grain playing its money form. Grain acting in its money form. And so any kind of landlord or landowning class that would then tax farmers invoke grain in that cash form. What I do think happens is that grain suffers because of its… All food cannot serve as money because fruits, vegetables are extremely perishable. Because grain has a certain capacity to last, because it is a seed and seeds have this biological need to protect themselves so that they can germinate in other times when the conditions are favourable. It has a tendency and a capacity to act in a money form as well. And so the silo I think what it does is it creates a kind of chemical environment and a physical environment, for grain to perform its money role, its value role, its capacity to become a commodity through which we can exchange rather than a commodity that we consume. And that is what I found interesting about a silo, that it creates the physical conditions in which the grain acts in its money form rather than its food form.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But also as this extremely valuable asset that you need to store for times of crisis so that it’s still in its money form can be traded and you speak about all the different people that are involved in that kind of economy, in terms of exercising, what is allocated where and how does grain move in the overall country or the system. What I found more interesting was the introduction of silos in India and you speak about how it’s a colonial… post colonial import when as a result of the Bengal Famine, India gets a couple of these silos from America, two of which you detail out very nicely these silos which were made out of galvanised iron, and somewhere later in your work, you also talk about your silos, which were built in the 1970s, where the material of construction of those silos kind of transitioned somewhere from a galvanised iron to concrete silos. And it somehow felt that was a good indication of all the technological developments that were happening within India, but also in the construction industry in terms of concrete and at this point, I’m specifically thinking about a professor at CEPT called Gauri Bharat who is currently writing a book on the advancement of concrete in India, and so I was just starting to think about it, it’s almost like when you look at the timeline, its…you can see those parallel developments, one which is happening in the construction material industry and one where in the food industry, you’re seeing the translation of materials. So if you were to reflect on the material cultures of silos, just to look at it from a more infrastructure architecture perspective. What was that shift like, in terms of size, scale, resources, labour and, of course, the capital that went into building these silos from first import, somewhere in the late forties, early fifties to the seventies, when there’s a lot of concrete being poured there and also these silos being built around the country.

Ateya Khorakiwala
One of the things I find fascinating about the material of cement but also concrete, so cement in its form in which it ends up in concrete, cement in terms of it being a component of concrete, is that it has this capacity to be used at different scales. You can range from a labourer to a contractor, mixing concrete on site to build something, all the way to ready mix concrete, being made based on a very precise formula for a very precise structural purpose that will have to reach your site at exactly a particular time. So that it can be poured in a particular order, so that that pouring can produce extremely precise structural outcomes. It can take loads and forces in very specific ways so, for example, I’m thinking about flyovers. To produce flyovers, you need very precise sets of… you need very precise ability to take load, and that capacity to scale the use of cement, I think, has been extremely key to why it’s such a successful material. You can work with different levels of expertise. I think that that has been central to how cement, to why cement concrete, reinforcement concrete as well became such a key material in the early to mid-20th century, where it kind of explodes as a tool by which to construct the new.. the urban explosion that we see. There are of course, some interesting stories over there about how importing cement is cheaper because to produce your own cement you actually need quite complicated and a robust network connecting mines from where you can get the raw materials, from factories to then cities. And those infrastructures were already present in terms of shipping routes, coming into what were largely coastal cities, like, Mumbai…cities across the coast of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. And so that transition needed to happen in those early years in the mid 20th century that after independence that the networks upon which the structure upon which contractors depended, needed to be made more robust internally. And that was, of course, was made possible by the developmental state because they could put in all sorts of restrictions as to where you get the cement from and demand that you could, they could put all sorts of constraints on import of materials and things like that, then that allowed the cement industry to develop in the way that we now see. Cement also because it was this major corporate endeavour? It had a very robust publicity machine as well. And so you can look at the Cement Association of India or like the Indian Concrete Journal or there are tons of magazines that are being published that cater to what I was saying earlier, which is the sliding scale of expertise. So you know, you publish an article saying this is how… this is how this one product for the interior of your house or for your compound wall or your, for your extension project, or anything like that, including drawings of houses, the plans that were furnished in these journals, including cement tiles were a big part of this. So the kind of versatility of the material and the versatility of expertise that could be applied to it, combined with the publicity machine of cement, meant that it became a very accessible way to intervene in what was a rapidly changing or growing world. One more aspect of this dimension was… the aesthetics of concrete, which is that this idea that the concrete… concrete surfaces are more hygienic, and therefore, you can get rid of any kind of material… materials like wood or mud or clay and instead replace it with concrete, we can clean it easily, you know, that of course is an idea that has been highly… a very suspect idea and highly charged… and rightly so challenged in more recent decades, but in the mid 20th century, the idea that concrete can bring in hygiene and therefore it could be used to address tropical diseases or it should be used in health centres and therefore we need it in villages to reduce child mortality, and hospitals, and all of these narratives come together, I think, to transform the use of concrete. I, totally digressed, what I wanted to talk about is that, I think something fascinating about, and I talk about this in my essay as well, is the relationship between the granularity of cement and granularity of grain. Cement doesn’t do this thing where it functions as cash. It doesn’t have this double role that grain plays. But cement first of all also needs to be stored in silos. So many of the silos being built are actually being built also to store cement at factories. And because of this capacity for these commodities to flow, to be stored in a silo so that you can flow out of the silos. They also need to flow physically but they also need to flow metaphorically. And to flow metaphorically is to say flow through the economy. And that’s actually what I was trying to describe why cement flowed so well for the economy. So all of those things that I was saying about where it’s manufactured, you know, shipping networks, etc. The point that I’m trying to make here is that cement flow has to be designed. Flow is not something that just happens automatically. And one of the transformations that happens both in the history of grain and in the history of cement is that they become commodities, which in the capacity to make them flow in designing the networks through, create conditions where we become absolutely dependent on them.

Vaissnavi Shukl
The second part was in terms of the technological development  in the silo making industry. Where do you see it going from there and where is it now? If you were to trace that arc.

Ateya Khorakiwala
Okay, so I think this is where you are interested in that question of the Gi… Gi silos versus concrete silos. So the galvanised iron silos, you know, fascinating story they’re coming out of this, I believe Kansas based company, right now it’s slipping, my mind, I should double check that but I think it’s a Kansas based company, Butler. So they developed this technology of galvanising iron, which made it last more, it made it more resistant to corrosion and this industry was supplying material for the United States’ war effort. Now, war demands a lot of steel. The United States’ government is sponsoring some of the production of these kinds of technology. And as a result, when the United States starts sending India grain because they are over producing grain, right like this is a key aspect of that entire episode of India importing US grain is that they have way too much of it. The Indian government needs to build capacity to store the grain that is coming and part of the reason that it needs to build this capacity is because it is relying on this grain to function in its money form and not in its food form. Because when… when you store that grain in its form in which it stores value, like the way in which money stores value. It keeps the price of grain steady. And this is that… I wanted to talk about this a little bit. Maybe we can go back to talk about this, because you brought up Amartya Sen’s work on exchange entitlements and it’s just such a fascinating argument that he makes, which is that labourers are not… the value of their labour crashes. So as an individual, your body has the capacity to labour, and then within the marketplace, that capacity that you have, has a price, has a value. And that value crashes. When that value crashes, it is not equivalent anymore to the value of grain. So it’s not exactly, I would not describe it as a barter system. As much as the market as a site of exchange is, and this really comes out of the theory of the market being the fundamental place at which value is determined. It is determining these two values to be different. So labourers are no longer valuable enough to purchase enough rice to support their own metabolic needs. That collapse that happens, leads to famine. What that means is that you have to, as a state, maintain those values so that labourers can exchange their labour at the… for wheat or for rice or for… or for whatever grain, whatever carbohydrate is the staple in that region. That is what this silo is doing. The task of the silo is to protect not the food itself, but its value. So what happens is that at the same time with the transformation of the construction industry, sorry, put a pause on that. Let’s just quickly address the whole galvanised iron technology. The US government sends these silos, they’re really symbolic. They send two silos. They’re sending them because they have their own contract with this Butler company, and it becomes a symbol of what they were able to produce out of their war effort. You know, their technological change that came out of World War Two. The United States emerges from World War Two as a glorious world leader, that GI silo becomes a symbol of all of that military and economic prowess of the United States in the world. Two silos are not going to solve this problem of storing grain. So all throughout this conversation, officials in the government are talking with civil engineers to try and figure out ways to very quickly store. And they hope to build  various forms of godowns, and silos and shells and various objects, largely, they just build  godowns, you know, what they call in literature is a conventional godown, which is steel truss with load bearing columns, or either concrete columns or brick columns. And so the technology in a sense, there is one hope for what might be possible. What kinds of possibilities: construction possibilities, architectural possibilities, aesthetic possibilities might come with expertise, you what beautiful things we can produce. And then there is the need to build very quickly and store very quickly so that the price of wheat can be protected from what the market might determine it if given, any kinds of fluctuations in the weather and so on.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I want to stay on this topic for a little more because it’s uncanny how about 80 years from that World War and that conversation about silo and wheat, we are in the middle of another war, which also involves wheat, and you spoke about the market as a site for exchange and because of this particular ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, and this is something I’ve been… a thread I’ve been trying to follow throughout this season, is just to try to get a grip on the different ways that the war has impacted not just like global supply chains, but also the question of the grain and the wheat and its role in the market place as the money knowing how much wheat Ukraine does export, what’s… what’s your reading of the present situation, through these lens, if you were to look at the grain storage and the role of wheat as the as the money. How do you read into what is going on right now?

Ateya Khorakiwala
So, this is, of course, such a complicated situation that has arisen. I would love to draw some of the historical threads of this complication of what happened…of how India reacted to that particular problem of Ukraine, not being able to necessarily export all the wheat that it has historically exported. First of all, just to quickly connect it to that story that I was telling of one place becoming the breadbasket of another or the granary of another. So Ukraine and some of the border states of Russia, including I could be wrong, but I think Belarus also has, you know, long had a history of exporting grain, I could be wrong about this. I have to double check. Don’t quote me on that. Ukraine has been fashioned, so this is a geopolitical history, right of why one country ends up becoming an exporter of grain to the extent that it becomes specialised in that particular way. That then gets threatened by this horrible war that is dragged on and it’s winning this horrible war. Let’s get to one historical thread on the Indian case. India, in the 40s and 50s. They used to call it “living ship to mouth”, that the US ship would come and you know, that’s how we would supply people with grain and service, this very deeply negative connotation, right that we are living ship…. It’s like “living hand to mouth” so instead of saying “living hand to mouth”, we’re saying we’re “living ship to mouth”. And then after the Green Revolution, one of the slogan was… it became a celebration of this capacity, particularly of Punjab, but also many other states to produce this bounty and become the granary of India instead of the country having to import grain and so it became from “ship to mouth” to “shipping out” and what was the pride of this process? You know, the national pride aspect of this, which again, has its roots in that long history that I described earlier, like long held debates on being independent… Being self-sufficient in food production, that shipping out has meant that the government is able to supply not just import but not not just self-sufficient, but also export grain, which was not the goal of the developmental state. The goal of the developmental state was to be able to produce high end products.. high end in the sense of complex industrial products, not just our raw… raw materials. Or agricultural produce. So other than that, which was really a change of tack after Nehru’s death. So shipping out meant that you could use your grain to bring in, you know, dollars for an exchange, things like that. Which are very important for economies to place the position themselves in relation to other economies you need to export something, then you have to make a decision the government had to make a decision to stop exporting because it needed to reposition itself in relation in group…in relation to other countries, because suddenly the demand for exports would go up, right like the price of wheat would go up. Farmers would want to export because they would want to supply to that higher priced market, instead of supplying to that but it would cause an outflow of grain and that would be detrimental to the internal on needs and not to the internal needs in terms of the quantity of supply, but to the internal needs in terms of the price. Indian consumers would not be able to afford grain which would possibly I don’t know this is speculation…it would… There is a worry that it would create all sorts of dis… distress, that frustration at the government, and they’re trying to manage frustration as much as they are trying to manage distress. So just to clarify, what I’m saying here is that there’s a restriction on export to prevent the export pressure for the price of grain. Given that the price of grain would be pushed up given that there is less supply in the world in general. What I’m trying to get at here is that it’s very much about the price of it rather than the presence of it, if that makes sense. Yeah. The other thing I want to point out here is that there’s also the question of how this was dealt with early in 2020, with the… with the country facing pandemic pressures, and again, all kinds of disruption of the supply chain of food. And there…and John Raze writes about this. He wrties a wonderful essay, which I recommend everyone go read if you’re interested in this. What he was saying is that the country… the government stores all of this food in silos, and warehouses and all sorts of various storage mechanisms. They cannot release those stocks. If they release those stocks at the moment that they release the stocks, they have to pay for them. So when they absorb them, they don’t pay for it. They don’t account for having paid for them. They can pay for them. They just don’t account for it. When they release those stocks they account for it as being paid for. That is when it reflects on the country’s ledger, which then means that they will be downgraded in certain international forums, and they won’t be able to borrow money as cheaply or they won’t… So again, you see that the decision was made based on how grain functions in its money form rather than on its as a commodity to be consumed. This, I think, has been a central interest in me as to how the metaphor of cash has shaped the biology of grain. I’m fascinated by how metaphors can be so powerful as to change an object that it is trying to represent.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But what’s also interesting in your work is and I’m going to shift gears here a little bit is that your your dissertation is this kind of macroeconomics look on the political economy of a country, the infrastructure developments, you also talk about the emergence of agriculture schools and the skill building that is required to sustain this, this new emergence, boom, that’s currently happening. But in your current research, and also the courses that you teach, you’re also doing a little bit of micro work. That’s very interesting, because you’re still looking at food, but you’re looking at it through an almost anthropological perspective, you’re looking at the act of cooking, you’re talking about the role of a cook, you’re looking at recipe books, and then you’re still feeling into some of these larger questions. I mean, maybe I read into it a little differently, but I also thought the question of offer when it comes to executing your recipe was was fascinating, because in the way you talk about it, and I didn’t think about it that way is a recipe is written food text, which almost goes out of commission or is rendered, adapted the moment the recipe is executed. And the way I thought about it is there’s so much power that the text holds, but there’s also so much agency that a cook holds, when they are making something, what is your course feasting and fasting about?

Ateya Khorakiwala
Yeah, I love teaching that class. It’s, it’s, it’s fun to teach it and I think the students responded really well. I think one of the things that is super interesting about teaching about the history of food is that thinking is one kind of intellectual work and eating is considered as a very different kind of bodily process not intellectual labour and even then, I do know that people love to talk about food, and there is tons of material on talking about food particularly and how food is represented in social media. And yet we eat so much right, most of our lives. We don’t think about what we eat, sorry, let me clarify, I’m not saying that we don’t think about what we eat. We all think about what we eat all the time. Food is deeply emotional and complicated. And we think about food all the time, as much as we eat as much as we think about it. What I meant to say is that, how do we use the kind of physical bodily process and use that and intellectual work around that at the same time, which is why I asked my students to cook something that someone else has written a recipe for? Because yeah, which is, I think, a way to remember that the recipes connect us. And the agency of the food that we brought up there you take the recipe, you make it, you make it up, you can make it and you transform it and in the process of making and transforming it, you make that recipe redundant. And so a recipe is really only something someone needs when they don’t know how to cook something. So yes, it is an object that is a kind of text that does so many different kinds of work. One is that it acts as a pipe… as an archive of how we know something. Recipes are surprisingly hard to move across borders, because markets are different. And so recipes have to change when they move across borders, which is why I asked the students to find or find someone to give them a recipe and that because then they have to face that challenge of how that recipe will change given their constraints that their lives place on them their kitchens place on them their instruments, they have all of these things, how it challenges you to transform these things, which we do, which we do without without, we do it… It comes to us instinctively. But it’s an intellectual process. So that’s a little bit what I’m trying to get them. What I find fascinating is how we don’t use it. We don’t attribute authorship, to it. And even though we often will say, Oh, my mother gave me this mother becomes just kind of signifier.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You’ll never really know if the mother is the author or mother is a resource in this case, most likely a resource.

Ateya Khorakiwala
But yeah, because you…you inherited a recipe and you transform it to be the author of the time during archives of it exactly, and iterates upon it exactly. And then we will iterate as well. And recipes are this kind of object that has both been authored… That is both simultaneously archive and author authored object. But I’m also interested in how food desert’s history of power, famously something like sugar. And so we will talk about how sugar has transformed economic networks around the world. What are some of the aesthetic applications of that? aesthetic in the sense of how different artists have used sugar to be able to critique that very long and complex, complicated history of plantations and slavery that has been that commodity impossible, that has made the… made that commodity accessible and how that how much so that commodity has becomes absolutely central to industrially processed food? What are the other things like yeah, that person’s really fun, it just brings so many of our so many things that we spend so much time thinking, it puts them in historical context, it helps the students to be able to, I think, develop a capacity to think historically about the everydayness of their lives.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What I really liked, that I thought it was a good kind of like, intensive way to make people think about it, is the question of taste. And of course, we were made to read a lot of like fan philosophers write about beauty and then we had a like in class discussion about the difference between beauty and taste where beauty is something that’s extremely visual and taste is something that is felt or acquired. So even here in your class, when I talk about taste, I thought that that nice like metaphorical translation of taste as like the broad idea of something that you prefer, like it’s a it’s a preferential to, to the taste as a sense, I thought was very, very interesting to just put the waters in that sense.

Ateya Khorakiwala
Yeah, I’m fascinated by how taste has structured our political economy. So what I mean by that is that sometimes we imagine what it is that is important, and it is easy to forget the extent to which the desire for pleasure or like the desire for spice shaped the Portuguese relationship with India. And so, economic networks are really big on gustatory desires.

Vaissnavi Shukl
A very, very interesting. Last question. What are you currently working on? And what’s next for you?

Ateya Khorakiwala
I am currently finishing the book that is the result of this dissertation project. And it’s called ‘Famine Landscapes’, at least tentatively, it’s called ‘Famine Landscapes’. I hope it will be done very soon. But these things take, yeah, they did, the date that they take. And it is going to talk about how famine produces labour, produces ideas of taste, produces the modern political economy of grain and then produces landscapes that emerge from these particular models of how we form labour. What I tried to do in this book is that I tried to argue how feminism, the kind of political process that transformed the countryside in the 19th century, has also shaped our physical and aesthetic landscapes. And then, once that will be done, it will be very happy for it to be out in the world. After that, I’m working on a history of materials. And so in this, I really want I’m interested in looking at the history of bamboo, plastics and how they have become central to the intersection between powers of extractive desires as consumers and also to how we both protect ourselves from the climate but also have transformed it. So what might be a way to think about material histories and architectural materials that we don’t necessarily always think about in architecture in the finished product, but have really been central to shaping modern construction industries? So that’s the next project. In the meantime, in between all of that, I’m also interested in questions that will tie into that history of agricultural universities that we talked about. I’ve also worked on other materials. So things like bitumen, which is, I think, a fascinating material in terms of the history of roads and paving roads. And hopefully I’ll be able to also work on some of the other materials. I’m super interested in materials and how they have how they produce certain kinds of relations around so bitumen is a material that refers to the history of the oil industry. I’m also interested in sort of key which is trying to be a kind of indigenous cement I’m interested in bamboo because that refers to kind of ecological history but at the same time is deeply embedded in labour in how labour is brought in as a form of expertise itself in construction and also it’s a bamboo plastic are important in architectural maintenance, rather than only construction and that’s one of the things that So if you’re interested in so that’s it I think so far all of the projects that I’m working on

Vaissnavi Shukl
Good luck for all of them and thank you for this conversation.

Ateya Khorakiwala
Thanks Vaissnavi.

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.