Beneath the Placid Lake is a film-based installation directed by anthropologist, writer & curator Vyjayanthi Rao and Mumbai-based artist & filmmaker Kush Badhwar. Drawing on archival footage from three generations of researchers, the film examines the narratives of displacement and environmental violence that followed in the wake of the Srisailam megadam project in the Southern Indian state of Telangana, today the country’s second largest hydroelectric dam by capacity. Blending photographs, videos, and text, the piece contemplates how social and cultural experiences of space are transformed when the decisions made at national level come to bear at a local scale, challenging how the dam’s contemporaneous representation in the media created the conditions to naturalize the devastation it caused.