Memory and Metamorphosis: The Afterlives of Ice Factories (Hammock Anthology- The City)

There are moments in a city - perhaps you’ve experienced them too - when walking past an old building momentarily unsettles your sense of time. It feels almost like a brief dissociation from the present, where multiple temporalities begin to layer over one another, and you can’t quite tell where one ends and another begins. This sensation of temporal overlap forms the core of my essay.

I trace the afterlives of two ice factories: one in Bombay, built in the 1800s during colonial rule, and another in Sharjah, constructed in the 1970s on the cusp of the oil era. Though geographically distant, these buildings are connected through shared histories of labour, trade, and their negotiations with a rapidly globalising world.

Moving between the scale of the building and the city, the essay explores how such structures accumulate multiple lives over time - becoming repositories of both tangible and intangible memory. These spaces operate as time capsules, where past and present remain in suspended dialogue, continuously reshaping how we understand the built environment and its relationship with the city.

🔗 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲: https://lnkd.in/d6j3H4YQ