Rahul Mehrotra’s many-sided portrait at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

Through publications, projects and video documentaries, architect Rahul Mehrotra and curator Ranjit Hoskote bring the former’s hybrid three-decade-old practice to Venice Architecture Biennale

Architect Rahul Mehrotra is no stranger to the Venice Architecture Biennale. Principal founder of Mumbai-based RMA Architects, he is renowned for projects of varied concerns and scales such as the Hathigaon housing for mahouts and elephants near the Amber Palace, Jaipur, and the various interventions to the CSMVS campus in Mumbai. In the course of each of his Biennale appearances (in 2008, 2016, 2018, and 2020-21), he critiqued and theorised urban change, questioned the notion of permanence in architecture, and broke down the rigid hierarchies in spacemaking — bringing new ways of looking at India’s trajectories of urbanisation.

The 18th edition of the Biennale Architettura, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect and academic Lesley Lokko, is themed ‘The Laboratory of the Future’. Her vision is to foreground previously under-represented places and peoples by exploring alternatives in decolonisation, decarbonisation, and presenting ways of doing architecture that are different from the usual consumption of natural resources. In response, Mehrotra, along with cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote and designer Isabel Oyuela-Bonzani, is presenting Loops of Practice, Thresholds of Habitability. 

The exhibition uses the feedback-loop as a leitmotif to re-examine various aspects of architecture, design, research, writing, advocacy, and pedagogy that form the basis of Mehrotra’s practice. Sited in the historic Arsenale in Venice, it emerges out of a configuration of screens, large video presentations, displays and vitrines filled with documents, providing a chiaroscuro experience quite in keeping with its Italian setting. Edited excerpts:

Hoskote: I believe quite strongly that the architect is well placed to be an agent of change in an unpredictable world shaped around shoals and currents rather than stable centres. They must address shifting patterns of policy, ecology, migration and livelihood. The [Marathi] saint-poet Tukaram speaks of building his house in the sky. In this spirit, contemporary architects must practice as a dynamic response to constant instability, rather than turning away into safe zones of patronage. Mehrotra’s three-decade-old practice achieved this, in a period beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and India’s move towards liberalisation, through globalisation and emergent totalitarianism. My approach was to develop a many-sided portrait of this productively hybrid practice, to regard it through multiple lenses, and see the connections.

Mehrotra: Looking retrospectively at my participation at the Biennales since 2006, I found an intersection between the themes earlier curators had unearthed and my own research trajectories. This edition became an appropriate venue to synthesise previous learnings and to think about future practice formats. Ranjit’s formulation of the last 30 years of my various engagements, into a taxonomy of Research, Advocacy, Practice and Pedagogy, show their simultaneous validity for architects to work in the future. This proposition of a multiplicity of working modes is valid for more than what you refer to as the Global South, and could resonate for our interconnected planetary condition.

Hoskote: I have drawn on three decades of friendship and conversations, and articulated a survey of Mehrotra’s work as friend, fellow traveller, and collaborator. As I see it, his practice is a model for how architects, especially in the Global South, can intervene creatively and generatively in a public situation mired in bureaucracy, ignorance, and pessimism. His trajectory has evolved in a rhizomatic manner, in response to existing problems yet also in anticipation of crises to come — from policy deficits in urban planning, through discursive gaps between expert culture and emerging audiences and userships, to the need for establishing solidarities between theorists and activists in shaping resistance to misgovernance and legislated urban chaos.

We translated the ‘intangibles’ through scrims and screens that shimmer in subdued light; through an ensemble of the publications that embody Mehrotra’s varied collaborations and bear witness to the convenings and congregations through which his practice in research, advocacy, activism and pedagogy has elaborated itself. We have recycled elements from his previous appearances [that were stored at a colleague’s home in Padua] to reduce our carbon footprint. Through video documentary, we demonstrate the spectrum of dialogues and negotiations through which this practice takes shape, in a spirit of capacious responsiveness.