Shivangi Mariam Raj
Public Lecture, online
25 November 2025
19:00
IZK Research Space, Kronesgasse 5/III, 8010 Graz
If you would like to attend online, please send us an email to izk@tugraz.at
The concurrent projects of genocide and imperialist expansionism in West Asia as well as South Asia have made a critical examination of rubble even more urgent than before. Often, conversations on the subject point to “colonial continuities” or “colonial legacies” as the reason for this violence, but such conjectures refuse to acknowledge that colonialism as a process and as a structure did not end with the creation of the modern nation-state project. Replete with democratic institutions, the nation-state only expanded the colonial order, with mass violence as its foundational grammar. This lecture mobilises rubble as a mode of enquiry to build a thorough critique of this order by investigating the weaponisation of the built environment and how forces of political domination utilise space to simultaneously commit and conceal several grades of violence against the minoritised and colonised bodies. It reveals ruination as the primary objective, and not mere collateral consequence of mass violence. Instead of viewing rubble in isolation, this lecture encourages us to reflect on the material and political economy of its production, accumulation, and circulation as well as on the strategies of resistance, refusal, and disobedience deployed against such designed destructions.
Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer and cultural worker based between Delhi and Paris, who utilises essays, poetry, and reportage for individual memory to coalesce into a broader inquiry of the politics of public remembering. Her work with The Funambulist focuses on the politics of space and bodies.