Mohammed Hasan Rinchhdiwala

Architecture/Architecture (International) (RIBA Part 2) MArch

The Art of Resistance

"It is the same crown, it is the same throne, it is the same poison,
it is the same wine, It the same land, it is the same beasts that rule it,
With such pleasure you have set my house on fire, knowing that the flames will never reach you,
For you bought all the tongues and the enslaved all the pens."– Bashir Badr, 2020

This project aims to mitigate the precarity of slum dwellers in Mumbai. The project develops on the dissertation ‘The Precarity Games’, which unearthed that certain slum dwellers in Mumbai were forced to set fire to their houses in order to resist state-driven evictions. The project develops upon this fire episode and uses the metaphor of fire to propose a series of disassemble-able houses which, in the event of an eviction, can be disassembled in a manner that creates a city-wide spectacle and draws attention to the slums and hence stopping the eviction. Even though the project chooses a site in Mumbai, the notion of using art to resist and shining light on the issues of housing can be used throughout the global south.