Lita’s House (2019 - ongoing)
“The Lita’s House series by architect and activist Sofia Karim emerges from her work campaigning for political prisoners across India and Bangladesh. Through the letters she exchanges with the prisoners, the poems they have written in jail, and her theories on An Architecture of Disappearance, she builds Lita’s House, an imaginary house for the disappeared and imprisoned; a mirror world of fascism, authoritarianism, struggle and resistance. A sense of both violence and liberation are embodied in this ‘house’ for activists, journalists, students, poets and intellectuals who are jailed or disappeared; a space where architectural ideals of silence, truth, beauty and geometry are inverted.”
“Today I re-read your poem “When is the New Year” and realised that I included several words and spatial concepts from this particular poem in my early architectural drawings: prison clock, my exploding pain, mass of time gathers, monstrous machine.
All these words appear in the drawings which depict architectural space as a system of “The whole tiny universe with all its planets and stars of galaxies” which you said appeared behind your closed eye-lids. The drawings are mainly black and it is this sense of the void that I feel so strongly today. What this notion of the void represents even in my own drawings, I cannot say. I am unable to decipher meaning.”
-Sofia Karim, letter to Prof. G. N. Saibaba, 1st Jan 2023