Ears to the ground, heart on the horizon
Sustaina India 1 – Inaugural Edition
Feb 2 – 15, 2024, CCA Bikaner House, New Delhi
Featuring projects and works by Debasmita Ghosh, Manjot Kaur, Rachna Toshniwal, Gaurav Jai Gupta, Pallov Saikia, Edible Archives, Climate Recipes, Shilpa Bawane, Richi Bhatia, Bhaskar Rao with Akash Das
Curated by Thukral and Tagra + Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi
Organized by Suyashi Smridhi, Milan Jacob, and Mihir Shah (CEEW)
At the heart of Sustaina India is learning that sustainability is a gradual and decentralized process of adapting to climate change. It cannot be imported and transposed, but needs to be built from the ground up across disciplines and demographics. When we received the invitation from CEEW over a year ago to establish a platform that could host conversations around art, science, and climate, we turned to material-based practices and solutions. As creators, we firmly believe in the power of materials to channel a sensorium of touch, smell, sound, and vision as paths to climate awareness and retention for the current and future generations.
Our inaugural fellows Debasmita Ghosh, Manjot Kaur, and Rachna Toshniwal echo this vision as they speak about the shifting lives of the Khond community in Odisha, present immersive environments with textures of forests, and weave tapestries with ocean waste that washed up on the shores of Alibaug near Mumbai. Together with fellows and other invited artists, Sustaina India presents a vast index of materials that revisit conversations around food, clothing, waste, architecture, forests, and non-humans.
At every juncture of this exhibition, we returned to the ideas of reducing, reusing, repurposing, and restoring to understand how feasible and challenging they are to follow. For instance, our cities provide alternative materials to art and exhibition- making including wooden panels made with crop residue, soy-based inks, and eco-friendly paints, all of which can align with existing practices of cultural institutions. As we continue to learn about the effects of climate change, it becomes our collective responsibility to share knowledge, find solutions, and hope that future generations will take the lead.
Thukral and Tagra
+ Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi
New Delhi, 2024
Living with the land | Debasmita Ghosh | Eco-architect | Sustaina India Fellow 2023-24
Materials: Mud plaster, cement, wood, paper, found objects
Debasmita Ghosh has been researching the changing architecture in Khond homes, inhabited by the few remaining Adivasi communities in Rayagada district, Odisha. The research captures the transitions in the ways of life of the Khonds due to climate change and other external factors. The impact of climate change includes temperature rise, changes in rainfall patterns and flash floods affecting agriculture and housing, among other things. Debasmita’s initial entry point was action-based research and workshops with Khond youth about the climate resilience of traditional Khond living. During her research, she witnessed hesitation and even disregard towards their traditional living conditions among the younger generation, as some of them aspire to modern ways of life. The research also brought forth how several community members are unhappy with these shifts across generations as they continue to impact the interpersonal and community dynamics of the Khonds. One of the key material changes that have come about is cement replacing mud plaster and asbestos roofing replacing terracotta tiles in the construction of houses, making houses significantly warmer with rising temperatures. Living with the land suggests revisiting traditional practices and learning from modern ones to see what combinations of them can be taken forward into the future to build resilience.
Biography
An architect by education, Debasmita Ghosh designs structures using natural materials, which are in sync with the environment. She works with rural and marginalized communities on the impacts of climate change and builds resilience through research and implementation. Her aim is a self-sufficient future in symbiosis with nature and rooted in communitarian life.
Credits
Mentor and guide: Debjeet Sarangi (deceased)
Co-researcher: Jagannath Majhi
Documentation support: Anjali Joy
Special thanks: To all the Khond women from more than 20 villages who have trusted and participated in the work & articulated their inner struggles, pains and thoughts.
There is no such thing called waste | Rachna Toshniwal | Artist | Sustaina India Fellow 2023-24
(In collaboration with Nari Shakti self-help group, Alibaug, Maharashtra)
Materials: Discarded wood, jute fiber, coir rope and other elements found on the sea’s shore
For the past few years, artist Rachna Toshniwal through her Other Side Studio in Alibaug, Maharashtra, has been conducting a series of workshops, projects, and awareness initiatives at the intersections of ecology, community and creative practice. Her specific contribution to Sustaina India is an extension of this engagement conceived through a collaboration with a community of women who live in the area. The project set out to reimagine the potential of waste that washes up on Saaral Beach by translating it into tapestries, textile sculptures and installations. It explores the warp and weft of the local community especially embodying their skills and stories around the sea. At a macro level, it advocates for the health of our oceans, which are one of the planet’s largest carbon sinks, while finding creative ways to repurpose waste from the marine ecosystem.
Biography
Born in Mumbai, Rachna Toshniwal is an artist and environmentalist. Her practice spans visual arts, performance, creative writing, and installation. After spending over fifteen years in eco-activism and grassroots development projects with indigenous communities in the Himalayas and other parts of rural India, she turned to art as a way of knowing and diving deeper into questions of self, nature, and ways of being.
Credits
Additional support from Preet Rathi Motwani, Madder Red Studio, Mumbai
Documentation support: Ashwini Chaudhary, Max C. Strong, Monique Romeiko, Charvi Patil. Support staff: Rakesh Patil, Ajit Patil, Ravi Patil, Prakash Gore.
Special Thanks: Lahar Mehta, Gopika Dahanukar, Rohan Shah, Aurelie Beer, and Markus Scott Alexander.
Nari Shakti: Shilpa Patil, Sujata Patil, Rina Vartak, Suvarna Patil, Tejashree Patil, Hira Bare, Jotsna Mali, Ratnaprabha Patil, Kalpana Patil, Kausalya Vartak, Vrushali Patil, Jagruti Patil, Harshada Mhatre, Pranaali Patil, Suchita Patil, Aparna Mhatre, Chitra Mali, Trusha Patil, Charvi Patil.
The parliament of forests | Manjot Kaur | Artist | Sustaina India Fellow 2023-24
Materials: 3 Channel video, sound, wood, soil, seed papers, pen, fragrance
The parliament of forests seeks to draw attention to ecology’s sovereignty and to think about what rights should belong to the forest. Wise trees, shrubs, intertwining vines, resilient grasses, herbaceous plants, mosses, algae, fungi, soil, lichen and water become the protagonists in this work. Responding to the ideas of inclusivity, diversity, and plurality of voices in an ecosystem, this three-channel video installation is a close-up video of forests that lie on the sacred lands of Semiahmoo, Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Lil’wat nation, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and the Métis Nation.
This speculative way of thinking/imagining with the forests will broaden the horizons of what it means to seek justice for the forests and the species that inhabit them. The work also aligns with the current debates around the wellbeing of forests, which is of utmost importance for all species in times of climate breakdown. The audience is invited to immerse in the landscape and write on the seed papers provided here: what rights should the forest hold according to them? The seed notes from visitors will then be placed in the planter. They are sourced from the Gram Art Project, Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh, India.
Biography
Manjot Kaur’s paintings, animations, and immersive interactive installations intersect the boundaries of speculative fiction, archetypal allegories, and precarious ecologies to push back against the centring of the human as a protagonist. Her works explore the sovereignty of women’s bodies and ecology. She cross-pollinates ancient mythologies and histories to reflect on the relationship between humans and more than humans.
Srinivas Mangipudi is an artist, curator, and researcher based in Goa. He works as a visual thinker for several climate initiatives. His interdisciplinary art practice thrives on mixing up the mediums of drawing, painting, video, sound, urban intervention, and generative algorithms. He is a fellow at Socratus. Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi is an independent curator based in New Delhi. His curatorial work unpacks the relationship between art and the constitution of public memory. He is currently the Principal Investigator at the experimental arts lab Pollinator.io.
Climate Recipes | Research project | 2023 – Ongoing Relayed by Srinivas Mangipudi and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi Material: Paper
Climate Recipes archives and relays lived and tested knowledge as recipes that shift our existing perceptions of adaptability to climate change. After conversations with environmentalists, foragers, academics, urban planners, eco-architects, chefs, farmers, and others in Goa, we collated recipes from their lived experiences of the environment. These recipes are entry points for an adaptable life suggesting different forms of creating, listening, cooking, grieving, training, building and loving. They collectively call to realign with the ‘flow of our existing planetary system and find sites of refuge’ in the wake of climate adversity. We see Climate Recipes as a growing archive that can hopefully reconfigure our everyday approaches to life.
Richi Bhatia’s practice navigates between drawing, performance, installation, and food intervention. Her work ranges from extremely intuitive to protracting processes of trying to interrogate the body and its relationship to food and consumption, which often find their roots in autobiographical and immediate surroundings. Using an eco-feminist lens she explores the role of women, care, and water bodies.
Hamlet without the prince | Richi Bhatia | Artist and Performer |2014 – Ongoing
Material: Paper
An ongoing research inquiry since 2014, Hamlet without the prince, serves as a tool to track the journey of the artist’s body from the realm of disease to one of prescribed normalcy. The fish scales, especially those of the freshwater fish Rohu, initially found their way into Bhatia’s work by a way of formalistic perception. The black marks on the scales came to represent her skin condition at the time. Beyond the lens of physiognomy, the work is further layered to deal with themes of disease, lore, cultural and regional food specificities and non-taxonomical ways of looking at animal and human interactions. Over time Bhatia’s visits to fish markets generated observations and thoughts about consumption,coexistence and the hierarchy of humans. They unpacked the anthropocentric imagination of extracting from theabundance of nature. Through these performances, she accounts for the emotional and commercial value attached to non-humans at various stagesof becoming as the agency of life diminishes, amplified by the brunt of the human- induced climate crisis globally.
Shilpa Bawane creates drawings, installations, and experiences that start conversations around climate issues. Using visual, olfactory, and sonic representations, she tackles issues of urbanization, poor water management, increased pollution levels, and carbon emissions. Her work explores the dynamics between human-made realities and limited natural resources.
उंबरठ्यावर भक्ती (Devotion at the brink) | Shilpa Bawane | Artist | 2024 Materials: Graphite and paper
Shilpa Bawane presents a series of large-scale drawings that are prototype studies for sculptural environments made from organic materials. They focus on the vulnerability of the environment around us, addressing our inherent human ability to sustain, recover, regain and rebuild. These pencil marks signify vetiver roots used in many parts of India, especially in hot-dry regions. The roots have functional uses in daily life where they’re used to bring down temperatures and create daily objects; they also have medicinal properties, and help hold the soil from erosion. Each line in these drawings is hand-drawn, keeping in mind the lines as found in vetiver, representing the way birds gather material one by one for the construction of their homes.
Bhaskar Rao is a policymaker and filmmaker by training, and an audiovisual composer-designer, soundscape ecologist, and writer by profession. Through his interdisciplinary practice, he explores minimalism and dissonance in spatial and temporal compositions. He explores the dynamics between humans and the more-than-human world, and the paradox of humanity as detached from nature.
Particles of a cloud | Bhaskar Rao | Sound Artist | 2022 Material: Audio
Nature, when expressed in the auditory sense, gives an entirely new perspective towards understanding and treating soundscapes as a living and continuously evolving heritage. Particles of a Cloud is an exploration of the temporal and spatial nature of our existence through the medium of sound. It is a listening experience composed of field recordings from various parts of Bir, encompassing a range of ecology, both natural and human-made, and with a focus on interpreting, and presenting soundscapes as a living heritage.
Pallov Saikia: A painter by background, Saikia initially used photography to document subjects for his paintings. However, he soon discovered that some photographs surpassed mere documentation, embodying the essence of his artistic vision. He discovered that the moments he was capturing couldn’t be translated into painting, nor was there a need to do so. He uses the photographic lens to revisit the diverse landscapes of his native village Rahmaria.
Rahmaria Archive | Pallov Saikia | Artist and Archivist | 2017 – Ongoing
Materials: Bamboo, canvas, and photographs
Named after Rahmaria, a village in the climate-vulnerable state of Assam, this project documents the transition of the landscape as it is gradually being taken over by the Brahmaputra River. Envisioned by Pallov Saikia, who was born and brought up in the village, the project delves into the history of its people, place, and culture through video, audio, painting, photography, drawing and writing. In this particular presentation, Saikia brings together a selection of five photographs that speakof the land being submerged in the water.The bamboo structure that holds these photographs comes from the village of Rahmaria.
Gaurav Jai Gupta: With a firm belief in ethical and sustainable fashion, Gupta’s philosophy has always revolved around responsible fashion and the design process. With a clear intent of increasing the scope of handlooms for the development of new technology to make clothing, he is passionate about research and technology. He tries to communicate his ideology through his runway presentations. Design intervention in handlooms and engineered clothing through studio weaving is a unique aspect of his work, enabling innovation and evolution in hand-woven textiles.
Kaalchakra | Gaurav Jai Gupta | Textile and Fashion Designer (Akaaro) | 2017 – Ongoing
Materials: Stainless steel frames, cotton & silk
Initiated in the year 2017, Kaalchakra is an ongoing project at Akaaro Studio. It is a fusion of craft and technology through an elaborate process of using particulate matter causing air pollution in makingdye for hand-woven fabrics, garments and installations. This project seeks a sustainable future through textile and fashion in the form of a conceptual fashion and design showcase. Delhi has been tagged as one of the most polluted cities globally, and Akaaro Studios,being based out of Delhi, wanted to understandartistic interventions in tackling air pollution.
