Alisha Raman

About

Alisha Raman is a spatial designer and researcher based in India and the UK. Her practice explores the intersections of art, culture, community, and ecologies.

Prior to studying at the Royal College of Art, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from BIT Mesra, India, and worked for firms in Tokyo and Mumbai. She also co-founded Studio atpX, an architecture, r-urbanism and media practice in 2019. Leading a small design team and collaborating with international architects, she explored social, cultural, and ecological impacts of the built environment and designed regenerative spaces for communities in India, South Africa and the US.

Instagram: @alisharaman  @atpx.io

Echoes of Toxicity looks at the legacy of nuclear energy on the Severn Estuary. It seeks to address the vulnerability of the humans and non-humans who live in the shadows of these power plants. And in doing so, imagines an alternative future which unfolds over multiple decades.

The project zooms in on the Oldbury Nuclear plant being decommissioned and the site moving towards what authorities refer to as ‘site end state’ or ‘environmental restoration’. The proposal emerges from research on the nuclear power plant structures in the region and the continuous dispossession and endangerment of local communities and ecologies. While directly born out of the plant (un)building, the project also critiques the overtly opaque decommissioning procedures of nuclear energy sites.

As nuclear plants are increasingly promoted as clean energy solutions, their numbers are growing worldwide. The resulting toxicity, presents challenges on timescales that are difficult to fathom. That is where this project sits. It seeks alternative ways of coexisting with the enduring contamination. Envisioning a future where we adapt and find new methods to live within these altered landscapes.

How can architecture become a tool to build new ways of coexisting with radioactivity? What spatial interventions can help citizens engage with, measure, and mitigate radioactivity?

And are there ways in which we can negotiate with these infrastructures to regenerate the landscape and address the environmental dispossession they cause among the human and more than human stakeholders of this ecosystem?