If the politics of aspirational construction appeal to the enchantment of infrastructure, reconstruction usually takes as given an environment of post-conflict, natural disaster, or the degradation of systems of preservation or resource management. If construction and conservation are taken as markers of continuity and political stability what does the urge to build again say about those who exert these ideas in advancement of a set of common goals? Shaped through multi-sited ethnography in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, this essay explores the mediation of mood and its material speculations. Concepts borrowed from both the preservation of the moving image and digital forms of heritage restoration provide ways of rethinking the place of reconstruction and coming to a new understanding of its sensual and atmospheric terrain.
Figure 13. Clockwise from left: An image from the inset of the construction kit of the shrine of the ahl-e-bayt in Jannat-ul-Baqi as it looked before 1925 and the Jannat-ul-Baqi construction kit in various stages of completion. (author's photograph).
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the AHRC (grant number AH/ L503873/1, ES/V011669/1).