Tower House, 226 Cromwell Road
Thu 6 Aug · 19:00 · Free
LECTURE PERFORMANCE Chronopolitics of Absence: We Begin Our Mourning in Dust 6 August 2026, 7pm This lecture-performance by Shivangi Mariam Raj reflects on the cosmologies, compositions and materialities of dust, examining what remains after destruction. Focusing on India, where minoritised lifeworlds are being desecrated, displaced and demolished, where everything is being flattened into debris, this talk explores how spatial markers of belonging, heritage and safety are being erased. From the sacred architectures of mosques and shrines to the intimate infrastructures of neighbourhoods and forests, every space is being forced to endure ruination. Shivangi Mariam Raj considers how this erasure is also reordering how the community inhabits time: people are being expelled from their histories, exiled from their futures and eclipsed from their own time. Here understood as a shapeshifter, dust is the residue of homeland, the object of devotion, the primeval unit of all life. Dust is everywhere and nowhere at once. By turning to the spacetime of dust, the talk orients us towards the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It foregrounds lives that are treated as a spatial burden, a demographic threat, lives codified as dirt grappling with the genocidal logic of ‘cleansing’. Image: Courtesy of the speaker. RSVP
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.