Smuggling the Future: Publishing as Creation of Slow Time
Workshop by Shivangi Mariam Raj
Please note: If you'd like to participate in the workshop we kindly ask you to send an email to jonas.vonlenthe@fhnw.ch with a short rationale outlining your background and motivation to participate. Accepted participants will be informed by October 5.
Deploying a volumetric approach to both language and architecture, this talk focuses on publishing practices under colonial and carceral contexts. It examines tactics, forms, and materialities of publishing as a political instrument and a pedagogical tool. In thinking about how captives and prisoners decelerate time, create channels of circulation amidst temporal interstices, and smuggle the temporalities of wait, it looks at publishing’s potential for defying the settler logics of containment and fragmentation. Because space and time are so tightly interlaced in a prison, an attack in one dimension necessarily weakens the other, thereby bending the spacetime continuum that grants the prison its imperishability. The talk will be followed by a workshop that carries this temporal rhythm of the dark and the negative into developing a cumulative text with a language that grapples with its own failure, a language that is obscure to the
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Smuggling the Future: Publishing as Creation of Slow Time
Workshop by Shivangi Mariam Raj
Please note: If you'd like to participate in the workshop we kindly ask you to send an email to jonas.vonlenthe@fhnw.ch with a short rationale outlining your background and motivation to participate. Accepted participants will be informed by October 5.
Deploying a volumetric approach to both language and architecture, this talk focuses on publishing practices under colonial and carceral contexts. It examines tactics, forms, and materialities of publishing as a political instrument and a pedagogical tool. In thinking about how captives and prisoners decelerate time, create channels of circulation amidst temporal interstices, and smuggle the temporalities of wait, it looks at publishing’s potential for defying the settler logics of containment and fragmentation. Because space and time are so tightly interlaced in a prison, an attack in one dimension necessarily weakens the other, thereby bending the spacetime continuum that grants the prison its imperishability. The talk will be followed by a workshop that carries this temporal rhythm of the dark and the negative into developing a cumulative text with a language that grapples with its own failure, a language that is obscure to the perpetrators, a language that does away with the need to insist on evidence and rather works to restore the link between meaning and mourning, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Together with the participants, we will create a publication-object by using eclipse as methodology, by building counterarchival densities, and by reflecting on the volume of absence.
Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer and cultural worker based between Delhi and Paris. As an independent researcher, she is interested in visual and spatial cultures of violence against the minoritized and the colonized across South Asia and West Asia. Her practice dwells in the negative, combining approaches in sociolinguistics, sound, photography, countercartographies, and translation. She utilizes essays, poetry, and reportage for individual memory to coalesce into a broader inquiry of the politics of public remembering. Her work has consistently challenged the foundational mythologies of the Indian state and its networks of accumulation across caste, capital, and colony. She continues to focus on spectral temporalities as forms of resistance in Kashmir. She is a university dropout and was previously working with Oxford University Press. She has been the 2024–25 Editorial Fellow for Logic(s) Magazine at the INCITE Center of Columbia University as well as the recipient of the Graham Foundation’s 2024 grant for research for her project, “Shadow Thresholds: Architecture of Ruin in India.” Her work with The Funambulist focuses on the politics of space and bodies. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript that examines the material and political economy of rubble across its aesthetic, architectural, and affective registers.
The workshop is part of Non-Public Publics, a series of events organized by Make/Sense Research and the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at FHNW Basel, and is embedded in the program of the MESH festival 2026.
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