Narrating a Wasted Landscape: exploring architectural heritage in an industrial town in Bengal
From the construction of India’s first coal mine in 1832, the district of Asansol in West Bengal has been both product and the agent of colonial and industrial processes. At the same time, its endlessly reprocessed, wasted landscape is also an ancient and sacred one. This talk explores how this landscape of waste is, and could be be narrated, following Homi Bhabha (2004) in using collaborative storytelling to articulate,
the writing of cultural difference in the midst of modernity that is inimical to binary boundaries: whether these be between past and present, inside and outside, subject and object, signifier and signified.
Ed Hollis is Professor of Interior Design at the School of Design, Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh).