<em class="tit1">beneath the placid lake</em> is a projection-based installation that examines the multilayered spatial, social, and cultural aftermath of displacement and slow violence following the creation of a massive dam in the southern Indian state of Telangana. The dam’s construction submerged roughly one hundred villages, forcing the relocation of about 150,000 people. Simultaneously, more than one hundred monumental temples were spared from the floodwaters through a complex process of salvage and preservation. <br/>Drawing on archives found and collected by three generations of researchers, <em class="tit1">beneath the placid lake</em> contemplates how experiences of space are transformed through forced evictions and when official, monumental histories intersect with submerged local narratives. The installation investigates how methods of knowledge production shape the representation of violence, often towards inevitability. <br/><em class="tit1">beneath the placid lake</em> resists this normalization through its formal strategies – combining photographs, moving images, and textual annotations – ephemerally meeting on the screen’s surface as a platform for dreaming different futures at varying temporal scales.