Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, November 7, 2017 in Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Nostalgia for the Future is a film about modernity, the making of the Indian citizen and the architecture of the home. It is a collaboration between filmmaker Avijit Mukul Kishore and architect Rohan Shivkumar, emerging from the intersection of their respective disciplines—architecture and documentary film—both of which have been ingrained in the discourse of utilitarianism and certainty. The film explores the role of architecture and film in imagining and constructing a nation and its citizenry.

After the 54-minute screening on Thursday, November 9, at 4:10 pm in Cohen Memorial Hall, Heeryoon Shin, assistant professor of history of art, and Akshya Saxena, assistant professor of English, will participate in a panel discussion with the film directors. A reception will follow in the atrium of Cohen Hall on the Peabody campus.

The film examines four buildings created over the period of a century: Lukshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda—the gigantic home built by a progressive monarch in the late 19th century; Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad—a private residence designed by Le Corbusier and representing the idea of domesticity within Nehruvian modernity; Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which epitomizes the Gandhian aspirations of the nation-state; and public housing in post-independence Delhi, designed by the Government of India to house refugees from Pakistan and the bureaucrats of the newly independent nation.

The film explores these spaces and imagines the bodies that were meant to inhabit them through the evocation of the cinematic and aural collective memory of a nation. It uses a mix of formats—16mm film and digital video in both color and black and white, along with archival footage from state propaganda films and mainstream cinema.

Avijit Mukul Kishore is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Mumbai, working in documentary and interdisciplinary moving-image practices. Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and an urban designer practicing in Mumbai, and Deputy Director at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies.

The event is sponsored by the Departments of History of Art, Cinema and Media Arts, Asian Studies, Political Science, and History.

*Stills from Nostalgia for the Future (2017) directed by Avijit Mukul Kishore and Rohan Shivkumar