Situated Imaginaries

Exhibition Design: Ronit Kothari, Yadnesh Bangar, Aditya Gupta, Dipraj Pagar, Akash Gaikwad, Sukhad Suthar, Upanshu Sakhala, Mahi Dattani, Riya Rathod, Om Dandekar, Manas Sontakke, Aman Nandu, Ankita Gathibandhe, Indraneel More, Aarya Nayak, Yuvraaj Khattry, Sanskruti Chavan and Shardul Ayare.

Supervisors: Anuj Daga, Milind Mahale, Tushar Rajkumar and Dushyant Asher

Rishika Waghmare

In February, during Annual Week at the School of Environment and Architecture, the exhibition “Situated Imaginaries” unfolded as a reflection of the school’s pedagogical culture. Every year this exhibition brings together student work across batches, but this edition felt less like a display of finished outcomes and more like an unfolding of processes, frameworks, and ways of seeing.

The title itself carries weight. “Situated” suggests that ideas are grounded; shaped by context, fieldwork, conversations, material encounters, and site-specific engagements.“Imaginaries” points to something still forming; speculative, open, and evolving. Together, the phrase holds a productive tension between grounding and possibility. The exhibition embodied this balance. The works did not present fixed answers; they revealed thinking in motion.

The exhibition opened with a performance by the first-year students. It unfolded as a sequence of scenes built through sound, movement, costume, and installation.The piece was not a conventional play but a layered spatial experience built through sound, movement, and costume. Students screamed, whispered, overlapped conversations, read out recipes, and produced mechanical rhythms. The performance moved through different thematic explorations; bodies, decay, machines, space, crowds, surfaces, motion. Costumes exaggerated certain body parts, installations extended the performers into space, and props shaped how they moved. Some students appeared constrained, some amplified, some almost absorbed into their apparatus. The shifts between loud and quiet, stillness and intensity, created a constantly changing atmosphere. It was less about telling a single story and more about exposing different ways of perceiving and occupying space.

A scene from the performance.

The performance was not merely an inauguration ritual. It functioned as a live demonstration of how ideas are constructed within the school. Personal observations were negotiated into shared narratives. Materials were tested, failed, and reworked. Concepts moved from paper to body to space. The process mirrored the exhibition’s core premise: knowledge is assembled through attentive engagement rather than assumed in advance. In this way, the performance acted as an embodied introduction to Situated Imaginaries.

The spatial organisation of the exhibition extended this thinking. The entire display was housed within a frame structure designed and constructed by students, with works curated and selected by them. The framing was both literal and conceptual. The structure held the projects together while also suggesting that every work operates within a larger framework of inquiry.

The layout was carefully articulated. The outer periphery presented works from the third, fourth, and fifth years. Moving inward, the core was occupied by the first- and second-year projects. This inversion was significant. Foundational explorations were not peripheral; they were central. The senior years formed a boundary of expanded inquiry, while the younger batches occupied the heart of experimentation and early questioning. The arrangement subtly mapped the school’s pedagogical continuum.

A walk through the exhibition.

Walking through the exhibition revealed the diversity of approaches within SEA. Some projects emerged from field-based engagements, others from theoretical investigations or material explorations. Yet they did not feel disconnected. They were held together by a shared attentiveness; to context, to detail, to process. These projects collectively shaped the pedagogical landscape of the school, each representing a situated imaginary formed through specific encounters.

What became evident was the sense of ownership embedded in the exhibition. Students designed the structure, curated the work, and shaped the narrative. The first-year performance was guided through dialogue with seniors. Decision-making was distributed rather than imposed. The exhibition therefore reflected not only what is produced at SEA, but how it is produced.

Situated Imaginaries ultimately operated as an apparatus of seeing. It encouraged slow observation and reflection. Instead of emphasising spectacle, it foregrounded inquiry. The exhibition made visible the ways in which ideas shift through engagement, how drawings evolve through critique, how installations carry traces of experimentation. It presented architecture not as a fixed object but as a continuously forming practice.

In doing so, the exhibition revealed a pedagogical environment that values attentiveness, reflection, and intellectual risk. It did not simply showcase projects; it articulated a culture of learning; one that remains grounded in context while remaining open to new ways of thinking and practicing.

The Exhibition Team