This research documents how British and American military infrastructure built over the last century in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean have systematically erased Indigenous settlements. Building on several pilot workshops conducted through the Harvard University Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship and collaborative relationships established through Belongers, a 2025 exhibition at Ffotogallery in Cardiff celebrating Chagossian identities, the project urgently documents disappearing spatial memories by working with aging community elders. The research develops "architectures of memory," a framework treating spatial knowledge in collective memory as legitimate architectural documentation beyond conventional built form analysis. The “Latelye Memwar” workshops conducted in the United Kingdom in 2023 revealed how Chagossians draw their homeland differently from Western cartographic conventions, creating counter-maps that challenge colonial spatial representations. Working with Chagossian communities in the United Kingdom and Mauritius, the project creates community-controlled archives while contributing to scholarship on architecture's expanded scope beyond built form.

Shane Ah-Siong is a Mauritian design researcher and architectural designer, with degrees in architecture and design from the University of Florida and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). His research focuses on spatial politics and colonial memory in the Indian Ocean region. He was awarded the Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship in 2021, which supported the development of the Latelye Memwar (Workshop of Memory) methodology and pilot counter-mapping workshops with Chagossian communities in the United Kingdom and Mauritius. His publications include "Cross-Oceanic [Post] Colonial Implications: The Puerto Rican Act 20/22 and Mauritian Smart Cities Scheme" (inForma Journal, 2026); "Letters from Generations of Exile: The Chagos Archipelago's Sovereignty Mirage" (Coreia, 2025); "United States of Archipelagos: An Intimate Take on the Chagossian Struggle" (The Funambulist, 2021); and a book chapter forthcoming in On the Table (Routledge). Shane presented research at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Nantes in 2026. He currently teaches architectural history and theory and design at New Jersey Institute of Technology and New York Institute of Technology.