Swapnil Agrawal

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will explore the architectonics of a hospital as home, meditating on its space as a palimpsest, through multiform artistic experiments, including writing, photography, material experiments, to investigate spatial memory, grief and the liminality of lifelong dwelling. Swapnil Agrawal is the Coordinator for this project. 

Swapnil Agrawal is an Architect (Re)Searcher, a graduate of the Bachelor of Architecture programme from the School of Planning & Architecture, Bhopal, and the founder of the Chaanv Collective, whose practice integrates architectural design, rigorous spatial research, and social justice inquiry. Her ongoing critical research focuses on how tribal schools in India, shaped by state and corporate agendas, spatialise systemic disempowerment, and seeks to reimagine education as a site of dignity and play through alternative pedagogies and design. Prior to this, Swapnil spent six years as a Studio Lead Associate at Ini Chatterji & Associates in Goa, where she executed five bespoke residences and focused on innovative construction techniques. She worked extensively with materials like fair-faced concrete and local timbers, devising custom formwork and low-tech methods for structural timber lamination and hand-cast flooring. Her work has been recognised with the Shared Ecologies - Writing Natures Grant (2025) and the Editor's Choice award from the Charles Correa Foundation for her short film Pakdam Pakdai (2025). Her project Tankis of Aldona was also exhibited at the Serendipity Arts Festival (2024). Given her experience, Swapnil Agrawal is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled Home/Hospital: is architecture memory? will be a deeply personal and spatial inquiry into the JP Hospital in Agra, which has served concurrently as the architect-artist's childhood home. The work will investigate the liminal state of the building, questioning at what point a formal institutional structure "stops being a hospital and becomes a home". This exploration is a response to the artist's lifelong experience of living in a site of both personal history, including birth, family life, loss of parents/grandparents, childhood and collective labour, including life and work, and the medical practice of parents. 

The artistic process will focus on documenting the building as a "palimpsest", how it physically "remembers" and how memory and grief metastasise through its crevices and material changes over time. Through a slow, multiform study, the artist proposes to go beyond technical architectural drawings by exploring writing stories, poems, "haiku in between prescriptions", and a return to analogue photography. The experiments in form will involve playing with the hospital's own materials, x-rays, old textbooks, prescription pads, for collages, or bookmaking. The artistic journey during the project will seek to understand material and spatial memory as a collective solace of inhabiting liminal spaces.

The outcome of the project will be architectural analysis, story and poetry writing, analogue photography, collages, bookmaking, and assemblages The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audio-visual documentation of the artistic process, drawings, stories, poems, and photographs.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to understand a personal space which is also a public space, with the hindsight of architectural training of making living spaces, as a moment to turn back at the personal, where memory itself is meditated upon as architecture, which will unfold through material explorations. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is supported by Parijat Foundation.