Project
Finding Spaces

Art  ·  Law  ·  Memory

This is for those who carry stories. This is for those who are still searching for space.
Where art remembers.

Welcome to a journey through art, history, law, memory and all the stories in between.

Project Finding Spaces is an evolving cross-disciplinary research, public scholarship, and storytelling platform to explore how art and material culture interact with history, international law, public memory, cultural heritage, identity, conflict, and the political 'other'. The hope is for it to act as an archival museum, an educational space, and a community resource. It is to carry forward and preserve the memory of what once was, through what still remains — art, objects, spaces, and stories.

This project is an invitation to witness and remember, with critical thinking analysis of what is lost and what is preserved. An exploration through essays on cultural erasure, narratives of survival and remembrance, memories through war art, analysis of stolen cultural property, and meditations on the political life of art.

What We Believe Spaces Hold

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Project Finding Spaces was born from a conviction that the spaces between disciplines — between art history and legal scholarship, between archives and oral memory, between loss and restitution — are precisely where the most urgent questions live.


We believe that understanding these histories is part of how justice gets imagined, and eventually made. And we wish to understand it through art and material culture.

Public Memory

Exploring how art, objects, archives, and material culture preserve personal and collective memory across generations.

Restitution & Cultural Heritage

Tracing how societies remember and forget through the placement, displacement, destruction, and return of art and artefacts.

International Law

Investigating how law, human rights, colonial histories, museums, institutions, and states shape narratives of belonging, ownership, trauma, and visibility.

Sanchita Aggarwal, Founder of Project Finding Spaces

Project Finding Spaces was founded by Sanchita Aggarwal in 2022.

Lawyer  ·  Researcher  ·  Writer  ·  Artist

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Finding my vision as a lawyer studying law and conflict with an interest in human rights, art, intellectual property, political movements, while also unfolding my additional identity as an artist, I understood the world of art through a different perspective: I understood where trauma lies and how conflicts undo and inform reality. It is the art and objects which hold memory, and hold the (real) reality in front of all.

There is a saying that history is written by the victors. Across time, we do not know so many stories and never might, but it is art which brings us closer to them. It captures human moments and emotions, allowing one to see or imagine how even a bystander may be feeling. It is art which acts as a continuing source of inspiration, information, survival, existence, suffering, joy, public memory and anything else which may have been.

It holds stories and it witnesses. It also compels us to question more, to wonder why, and to explore. Both making and preserving art is an act of power, one which is on the side of humanity. And through Project Finding Spaces, I hope to find and bring exactly that to the forefront: more stories and art, rooted in this feeling. I hope to have more people join in and for this to become an interactive community project with time.

Research, Essays & Curated Case Studies

Scholarship at the intersection of art, law, and memory

Essay · Legal History

When Paintings Were Law: Mapa de Cuauhtinchan

An exploration of how pre-colonial Mesoamerican cartographic paintings functioned as legal documents and how their displacement challenges contemporary restitution frameworks.

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Essay · Memory & Ecology

How Do We Remember a Species Whose Archive Is Also Its Wound?

A meditation on ecological loss, archival silence, and the ways material culture carries the memory of what has disappeared from the natural world.

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Essay · Visual Culture

Propaganda in Orbit: Visual Culture and the Space Race

Examining how states weaponised visual culture and artistic production during the Space Race as instruments of ideological dominance and soft power.

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Be a part of a community of people who deeply care.

We welcome collaborations with researchers, lawyers, archivists, curators, journalists, and anyone whose work touches the spaces we explore. Reach out to pitch a piece, propose a project, or simply begin a conversation.

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And if you've ever seen or owned an object, an artwork, or a piece of material culture that made you feel something deeper — about culture, loss, or identity — I'd love to hear about it sometime. Your stories will help build a public repository preserving these narratives: an act of memory against forgetting.

In memory and in resistance. Thank you.

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