Expired March 27, 2023 6:59 AM
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With sumptuous colors, trippy visuals, and fourth-wall breaks, these shorts reimagine our built environments. As time warps and bits of the past bleed into the present, from Soviet buildings to Italian cinema, these films ricochet between nostalgia and haunting.

Letters from the Middle-Ground is an architectural response to the postcolonial concept of "cultural hybridity" through a syncretism of British and Indian cultures. The film tells the story of the search for a spatial language, depicting the migrant’s experience of being rooted in many places at once. The project is located at the Prime Meridian line in Greenwich, a landmark described as both the centre of world time, but also a political decision that labelled the East as "other." The building deconstructs this line; it is a poetic antithesis to a world divided in two halves, creating a fertile third space where cultural hybridity is unleashed. Given the abstract and undefined nature of hybridity, the building is shown in constant transition. The film’s protagonist experiments with different typologies of imagined hybrid spaces – spatially illustrating architectures that reference historical Indian architectural motifs and miniature paintings. The resulting architecture is a hybrid of Britain and India, the past and present, the real and imagined.

  • Year
    2022
  • Runtime
    7 minutes
  • Language
    English
  • Country
    United Kingdom
  • Director
    Vitika Agarwal