Once a site of daily human and nonhuman interaction, the old Jubail fruit and vegetable market now holds the echoes of its past—vendors, buyers, cats, and fish, all entangled in networks of long-standing exchange and care. As the open-air market gave way to redevelopment, these connections were fractured, leaving behind architectural residues and traces of former lifeways.
What if we slow down and attend to these remnants? What stories emerge from observing what lingers? Anthropologist Neha Vora examines layers of multispecies urbanism, exploring how nonhuman inhabitants—particularly stray cats—navigate the absence of former kinship networks and adapt to shifting urban ecologies. Extending this inquiry, Artist Richi Bhatia engages with these ruptures through material practice, reanimating severed relationships of markets and foregrounding past-present layers of urban narratives.
Moving between structured discussions, self-guided observations, and collective reflection, we will explore the layered histories embedded in the site. We will engage in interdisciplinary methods through documenting material traces, collecting objects, and analysing emergent narratives to help us reconfigure our understanding of urban space—not as a human-centric construct, but as a shared habitat.
