Monuments to Everyday Practice: Kalamkhush Paper Center
august - December 2021
The Story
India’s independance was a process that struggles with regaining the control over the means of production and the right to produce. The colonial government was mainly interested in India as a source of raw material and a market to sell the processed goods.
The Indian struggle for freedom began with the British exploit of Indian cotton farming.
Cotton was shipped to Britian to be manufactured and exported to India at profit.
Gandhi embraced non violence in protest of British exploits through acts such as the Salt March, cloth burning, and spinning his own cloth.
He printed his own newspaper to garner resistance through labor.
Kalamkhush grew out of demand for cloth from the protests.
After Indian independance, Kalamkhush moved 1mi/1.5km from the center of the Ashram.
At some point, Kalamkhush switched to paper production, as cloth became obsolete, used strictly for ceremonial purposes and political nostalgia.
Despite producing paper now, the architecture barrs outsiders to notice the practice of labor.
India today suffers from censorship and political dissent through mass public surveillance.
Perhaps there is opportunity to repoliticise paper for it’s analog nature is disconnected from the digtal world through giving it a modern use as a newspaper.
Intervention
Kalamkhush as a subject is examined to align it with Gandhian principles in a process of revealing the labour. The process aims to create a series of conditioned and covered exterior spaces that seamlessly blend circulation into the production spaces. This begins by breaking down the massing into distinct constituent parts.
Production spaces’ qualities offer the opportunity to create intimate spatial moments amid the drying racks of paper for education and discourse. As such, the spatial context of labour is celebrated through congregation.
The front is more public than the back, which is an opportunity to create the diphasic privacy needed to instill the privacy needed for Kalamkhush to regain its political identity in the Ashram society.
An underground printing press serves as a spatial metaphor as a sanctuary against the invasive government.