Interiors & Interiority

A site-specific home renovation as spatial, emotional, and conceptual inquiry

This project began as a deeply personal, site-specific renovation undertaken during the pandemic lockdown, when work-from-home conditions forced the home to stretch, adapt and reorganise itself around new rhythms of living. What began as a functional need soon expanded into an inquiry into interiority, identity, embodied habit, and the emotional and symbolic weather of domestic environments.

Drawing from theoretical discussions around the interior as interiority and distinctions between the “political interior” and the “public interior” (as outlined in the cited article), this project approached the home not simply as an architectural container but as an active psychic and cultural space. The interior becomes a site where everyday life meets memory, aspiration, vulnerability, labour, care and the subtle negotiations each body makes with its surroundings. 

The Question of Public Interiority

Beneath the beautiful and comforting interiors lies a deeper question:

Can the desire for aesthetically pleasing interiors sometimes be a coping mechanism for the near-complete absence of “Public Interiority” - especially in developing nations like India?

When the public realm offers little sense of care, safety, intimacy, or collective belonging, the home becomes overloaded with expectations it was never designed to carry. A balcony full of lush plants may create the illusion of openness, even as the next building stands oppressively close, blocking the entire view. This gesture becomes a way of compensating for the insufficiencies of shared space.

Process & Approach

As an artist and maker, my approach here was intentionally function-over-form and centred on the actual lives of the occupants - their bodies, gestures, sleep cycles, work routines, and spatial habits. The renovation aimed to build an environment that could respond intelligently to lived realities rather than follow abstract design ideals.

This meant observing micro-behaviours: how people sit, how they store objects, where their attention moves, what creates friction, and what produces ease. From these observations, I reconfigured space through small but meaningful architectural shifts: reorganised zones, custom storage, repurposed surfaces, new thresholds of use, and an overall emphasis on openness and lightness.

What emerged was not just an improved interior, but a reflection on how spaces quietly shape emotional worlds - how a room can reinforce anxiety, or ease it; how arrangement becomes a form of care; how architecture becomes part of a person’s symbolic order.

Conceptual Underpinnings

Interiors hold traces of past selves and shape future ones. This project asks:

• What does it mean to rebuild one’s environment from the inside outward?

• How do domestic spaces absorb or resist emotional histories?

• How does a room mediate between comfort and anxiety, care and control, openness and enclosure?

These questions guided the process more than stylistic concerns. The interior, here, is not décor; it is infrastructure for interiority. 

Interiors & Interiority remains a central reference in my practice - shaping how I understand the relationship between inner life and built space, how environments internalise themselves into the body, and how spatial arrangements become forms of care, containment, or resistance. This project reinforces a common thread in my work: that environments - whether a room, a street, or a city - shape the self as much as the self shapes them.

And even after all adjustments, one truth persists: Renovations remain as reminders of the “Lacanian stain” - the element that cannot be fully resolved, the residue that every symbolic reorganisation leaves behind.

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.”