A site-specific, highly personalized and nuanced home renovation project was undertaken for a long time friend, his family and their extended social circle. The project was conceived during the pandemic lockdown when work-from-home conditions required stretching the notions and facilities of a home to also accommodate professional work space (both tangible and intangible).

As an artist and a maker, my intentions were to apply a function-over-form approach to  interventional design strategies, taking cues from the principles of socially engaged community / interactive art.

The focal point of my research on the site and its surroundings was the occupants' physical bodies, their habits, and their personal interests - both in their physical and symbolic manifestations. This focus guided me in developing designs for all the furniture and in renovating select portions of the residence.

Beneath the beautiful and comforting interiors, may lie a deeper question, Can the need for beautiful interiors, sometimes be a coping mechanism against the nearly absent “Public Interiority”? ; especially in developing nations like India. For instance, looking at the lush plants in the balcony, it's easy to miss the next building standing abjectly close and blocking the entire view.

THE LACANIAN STAIN

We think of the home as a shelter, a space of warmth and familiarity. But what if the home is, first and foremost, a screen? Not one that protects us from the outside world—but one that projects our fantasy of control onto chaos?

In Interiors & Interiority, the so-called renovation is not a beautification. It is an ideological operation, a symbolic surgery on the subject’s coordinates of meaning. This is not a project about making space functional. It is about making the self coherent enough to be endured.

What is a renovation if not the desperate attempt to reassert symbolic order—to say: This is mine. This is who I am. This is where I begin and end—in a world where subjectivity is always already fragmented?

The living room becomes the ego. The bedroom, the repressed. The balcony, the fantasy of escape. The desk, where production masquerades as identity.

But the joke is: the more you perfect the interior, the more invisible the real disorder becomes.

The lush plants? They are not flora. They are camouflage - a distraction from the Other’s gaze (the neighbor’s wall pressed too close, the lack of public space, the unbearable density of being). Beauty here is not aesthetic; it is defensive.

"Interiority” is not psychological. It is architectural ideology - the spatial arrangement of self-deception.

The pandemic didn’t just stretch living space - it exposed it. Made it clear that what we call “home” is often just a failed compromise between private fantasy and social precarity.

And what is “public interiority,” if not the space we pretend exists, but never quite materializes? In a culture where civic space is decaying, the bourgeois subject flees inward, dressing their trauma in teak wood and LED mood lighting.

The renovation thus becomes a kind of ritualized disavowal: I know the world is collapsing, but nonetheless I invest in better cushions. I know my neighbor’s window is six inches from mine, but nonetheless, I install vertical gardens and mood lamps.

The artist’s intervention here is not design - it is interruption. A slowing-down of the compulsion to resolve space, to finalize identity. What emerges is not furniture, but a portrait of anxiety disguised as taste.

“You want a beautiful interior? Fine. But remember - every velvet cushion is stuffed with the panic of symbolic collapse.”