“A house best performs its primal function, to provide shelter, when it is under attack from the elements.”
The Architecture Concept Book, James Tait

How do you give a building, almost a ruin –  a voice ?

 There is always a first glimpse, something that catches the soul, stirs the mind, and asks you to look closer. This is how my encounter with a ruin began—an anonymous, faceless structure across from the residency in Khirki Extension, South Delhi. Not fully a building, not entirely debris, but a witness suspended in time.

From the beginning of my residency, I traced its story: a short-lived structure that functioned for only a few months before its partial demolition. Its floors and roof were cut away, leaving it impossible to use, yet still lingering in its broken state. Over time, the ruin has taken on many parallel lives: shelter for those passing through, a dumping ground where waste collection fails, a reminder of widespread practices of construction and erasure in the area, and a site around which numerous artistic interventions have unfolded.

In learning its history, through the voices of neighbors, traces in archives, and fragments of bureaucracy, I found myself building a relationship with this ruin. Like with a friend, intimacy came through time spent, through care, through listening. Its memories now live within me.

My work seeks to give this building—a near-ruin—a voice, inviting it into the residency and into presence. The invitation is poetic, yet the administrative path to make it possible has been its own arduous narrative, full of negotiations with authorities. While the original vision was larger in scale, this installation offers an initial articulation of the ruin’s voice: we no longer see walls and bricks merely as structural fragments, but as rightful inheritors and carriers of memory—essential organs that hold the story within themselves. Their presence unfolds across two spatial registers—there and here, site and gallery—through which the fragments of the ruin speak.

 – A piece of the pre-cut floor slab, carried into the space, a guest among us

 – A lenticular postcard, resisting oblivion, making the ruin memorable

 – Crystallized remains—concrete, three bricks—transformed into objects of attention

 – Notes and testimonies gathered through the research

Together, these gestures allow the ruin to manifest here, no longer invisible. It remembers, it adapts, and it speaks—of fragility, resilience, and the ever-shifting life of the urban landscape.