“The house is, after all, performed every day. The house is inscribed and described by the ways in which we act out our intimate lives. This is where we sleep, we eat, we shit, we f***. We make the house through inhabiting it. The tangibilities within which we perform these prosaic activities overspill the boundaries of the traditional building. The architecture of the house spills out of walls, breaks across boundaries, makes intimacy in uncanny ways,” said Rohan Shivkumar, Mumbai-based architect, filmmaker and professor at the start of a ~dialog(ue), Lovely Villa - Architecture as Autobiography, at NCPA Mumbai on January 12 as part of the ~logue programme at ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025.

The session followed a screening of the film Lovely Villa (2020), created by Shivkumar and Mumbai-based filmmaker, curator and cinematographer Avijit Mukul Kishore. Distinctive flickering black and white state-sponsored films, magenta-hued film camera family photos, pixelated images taken with now-obsolete cellphones tell the story of India in the 1970s, marked by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the riots that followed, refugee crises and the liberalisation of the country’s economy. The short film maps the imaginative, collective process of nation-building onto the architecture of a time marked by rapid change in India.

The home is always constantly made. You're always making new homes constantly and it's necessary that we constantly imagine homing more as a process than we do as something that needs to be fetishised as a place that we all need to return to, nostalgically. – Rohan Shivkumar

The lines between the era-defining and everyday, the personal and political, blur in buildings like Rajendra Nagar refugee colony in Delhi (named after the first Indian president), flanked by Nehru Park and Patel Nagar, that emerge from Kishore’s childhood memories. The figure of Charles Correa, the famed Indian architect, looms large over the film, his ideals preserved in the LIC colony in Mumbai and its titular Lovely Villa. The significance of the tubelike shape of the apartments, their varying sizes, open terraces and shared landings extended beyond the architectural or economic. They were part of Correa’s social imagination—fostering communities where castes, classes and religious communities mixed, speaking across terraces and pausing on landings for a conversation with a neighbour; what the film calls “a mirror for the nation, in the miniature”.

In the session, the filmmakers were deliberate in dissecting the autobiographical nature of the film, picking apart the façade of authenticity and the dangerous filter of nostalgia that might accompany a personal narrative. In unpacking the word ‘personal’ and creating gaps that allow the political and the collective to enter, Shivkumar and Kishore mirror the ending of their film, excerpted from Buster Keaton's film, One Week (1920). The façade of the perfect, typical house falls, revealing itself to be flat, full of holes for the inhabitant, the protagonist. The house falls apart, spins into a storm, moves and is finally dashed to pieces by a moving train.

As the session wrapped up, Shivkumar reiterated, “The home is always constantly made. You're always making new homes constantly and it's necessary that we constantly imagine homing more as a process than we do as something that needs to be fetishised as a place that we all need to return to, nostalgically.” As battles of belonging, nation-making, migration and religious extremism take over India’s cultural landscape, grappling critically with what home can mean becomes a more important project than ever.

With ADFF:STIR Mumbai geared to return to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2026, we look back at key conversations from the ~log(ue) programme and highlights from the 2025 edition. Stay tuned for more throwbacks and exciting updates to be released in the coming weeks.