Preliminary Analysis: I lost while tracing the grey

Somatic registers, material translation and an anti-amnesiac recording along the Suri-Pathra corridor.

Graphite Drawing on Paper

Overview (ongoing)

This project is an ongoing site-specific inquiry situated along the Suri-Pathra Road in Birbhum, West Bengal (India). Serving historically as an administrative and colonial vector (1820, 1876), this corridor now operates as a site of intense metabolic flux.

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Diagramming the Translation

Diagrammatic translation matrix mapping physical site phenomena along Site-1 into internal psychological registers and material outputs (in progress)

The research operates across three nested scales

• At the macro scale, the project contextualises the Suri-Pathra corridor within a historical trajectory of state and colonial spatial organisation (1820, 1876), stretching toward the Jharkhand border as a buffer zone and administrative nexus.

• At the meso scale, the road functions as a living, mutating organism—a site where infrastructural expansion steadily encroaches upon transitional spaces, open fields and forest boundaries.

• At the micro scale, the inquiry anchors itself at Site-1, a site of immediate sensory encounter. Here, outer environmental phenomena (external registers) undergo a somatic translation into inner psychological states (internal registers).

These internal registers directly drive the project's material translation. By converting environmental residue into Drawings and Paintings, the practice employs graphite drawing as a tactile witness and anti-amnesic record; oil painting renders unease, spatial understanding and fragmented landforms.

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stress-test simulation

• What if the process of land clearing and concrete enclosure accelerates multiple times beyond human capacity to register it?

• What if the airborne "grey" overshadows the place entirely, erasing all visual landmarks into total spatial amnesia?

• What if a road does not scar the way skin scars—what if, under continuous disturbance, it simply collapses?

• What if, when the applause of the ruins fades, nothing is left listening—neither the road nor the forest, but only the smoke?

• What if the land survives its own disturbance not by resisting the damage, but by carrying its scar as a second, truer shape?

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Expected Outcomes & Deliverables

• Field Notebooks & Audio-Visual Logs: Primary research materials capturing sensory recordings.

• Drawings on Paper: A series of graphite drawings from Site-1.

• Oil Paintings on Canvas: A series mapping and reflecting spatial alienation, unstable topographies and expanding concrete boundaries.

• Spatial Installation: An exhibition layout that organises drawings, paintings, sound and site logs.