Sakshi Ahuja

This hand drawing portrays the invisible borders of Australia's immigration system through the lens of a migrant. Referencing speculative precedents such as Archizoom’s No-Stop City and Neil Spiller’s Communicating Vessels, it appropriates the representational tools of radical architects to expose the grid-ironed, colonised order of White society - the bureaucratic mechanisms that structure the path to Permanent Residency. Ravana, the ten-headed demon-king from the Ramayana, becomes a central allegory for this system. Recast here by Sakshi, his ten heads, once dismissed by colonial narratives as pagan and nonsensical, transform into instruments of surveillance and control.

Welcome to the Ministry of Immigration; a speculative structure that depicts the immigration pathway a migrant must take to obtain Permanant Residency in Australia. Ravana, the 10 headed demon from Ramayana, stands as a symbol for white supremacy within the higher, privileged levels of the building. Below, the migrants burn his effigy, in the tradition of Dussehra, as an act of resistance and anti-racism. Through this act of re-mythologising, the work proposes a method of decolonising Western architectural representation, reclaiming the speculative hand drawing as a site of resistance, critique and cultural agency.

Using Auto-ethnographic drawing as a research tool, Sakshi aims to understand and depict the life of a migrant in Australia. She compares the experience of gaining entry into Australia to that of a race course - a competitive battlefield with economic, linguistic and cultural hurdles to overcome. Using Indian patterns and motifs, she experiments with the act of decolonising architectural drawing - what lies beyond the conventional black and white?