City As A Spaceship (CAAS) (est. 2007) is a collective founded by Susmita Mohanty and Siddharth Das, later joined by more members. The collective reimagines how human beings inhabit cities as spaceship-like ecosystems. Rooted in the conviction that future urban environments should produce most of their own resources locally while remaining connected to larger grids, CAAS seeks to balance self-sufficiency with resilience. Waste is recycled into their proposed system, redundancy is built in, and the metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ becomes a tool for designing habitable, efficient, sustainable cities. Their concept of spaceship-ecologies reciprocates with planetary ecologies to deepen CAAS’s exploration of water, society, and technology boundaries. CAAS has manifested globally through lectures, installations, design studios, residencies and workshops in cities like Amsterdam, Mumbai, Paris, Toronto, New Delhi. Its members include:
- Susmita Mohanty, a spaceship designer and serial space entrepreneur. She is the founder of multiple space ventures across continents.
- Barbara Imhof, a space architect focused on sustainability, transformable spaces, and resource conserving systems.
- Sue Fairburn, who brings expertise in environmental physiology, critical design, and materials for extreme environments.
- Rohini Devasher, a collaborating artist whose practice explores astronomy, deep time, and speculative futures through drawing, video, and sound.
City As A Spaceship (CAAS) works at the thresholds between Earth and space, using remote and extreme environments as laboratories for reimagining how humans might live in the future. Across four interconnected works, the collective explores amphibious states-where land, sea, atmosphere, and cosmos merge. Amphibious Futures (posters and field-note book) captures their raw, in-the-moment encounters at Loch Long, weaving underwater stills, movement studies, maps, and annotations into visual dialogues that trace shifting ecologies and embodied sensing. Abyss to Atmospheres extends this inquiry through the free diver’s descent, revealing how breath, pressure, darkness, and suspension collapse distinctions between oceanic depth and outer space. In Into the Water, Martian wind recordings merge with Highland landscapes to imagine planetary entanglements and the ancient aquatic origins of life. Together, these works invite viewers into an amphibious imagination-one that unsettles boundaries and speculates on reciprocal futures between sea, earth, and space.
Image: CAAS Collective (Susmita Mohanty, Rohini Devasher, Sue Fairburn, Barbara Imhof), Amphibious Futures (2022), Posters, A2 size prints; Amphibious Futures (2025), Field notebook, A5 size print; Abyss to Atmospheres (2022), Single channel video; Into the Water (2022), Video. Installation view of Amphibian Aesthetics at the Ishara House, Kochi, Kerala, 2025-26. Photography by Biju Ibrahim
