Varsha Nair

NR1: Wadhwana

The project NR1 Wadhwana brought together individuals and groups in a 3-way collaboration between art + community + science.
Set up were workshops in seven schools in villages located in the immediate vicinity of Wadhwana Lake, in which children and teachers from the villages of Wadhwana, Kukkad, Shamshedpur, Akotadar, Shimoliya, Gopalpura and Manjrol were involved. Introducing key points about the ecology of the area and raising awareness of the importance of caring for this wetland, the children were encouraged to keep a diary and record what was of significant in their environment. An important part of the project was mapping that which the children use as markers to navigate their locality.

The activities also introduced interactions/play and discussions about the visiting migratory birds and the importance of maintaining the indigenous trees and plants already growing in the villages and lake area, with saplings of more indigenous trees being planted in school grounds and by the lake.

The marks left on site are the trees and shrubs that support the land, the people, and the insect and bird life, we planted together, with more planting planned in future to introduce indigenous and rare trees/grasses and by placing logs and branches that form a different kind of bower – each with its own blueprint and identity in terms of diversity.

Underlining the concept of serving nature, to some extent the outcome of this on-going project is not set as one end result but left open-ended to allow the possibility to encounter the unexpected arising from inputs by the many who are involved in the process.

Varsha Nair.

NEGOTIATING ROUTES: ECOLOGIES OF THE BYWAYS I

Inspiration:

“ The planting of seven thousand oak trees is thus only a symbolic beginning. And such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, …. The intention of such a tree-planting event is to point up the transformation of all of life, of society, and of the whole ecological system….”
Joseph Beuys-7000 Oaks, Documenta 7, Kassel 1982

7000 Oaks functions not just literally in environmental terms, but also symbolically as inspirational imagary. It embodies Beuys’s utopian and poetic metaphysic of a social sculpture, designed to initiate a revolution in human consciousness, by means of its permanence and longevity; “the human being as a spiritual being.” The work also sought to render “the world a big forest, making towns and environments forest-like.

In 2006 the Taiwanese artist Wu Mali floated the idea of diverse artists groups planting trees across the Tropic of Cancer: a queen’s necklace adorning the earth – a project that was the out come of individual initiation and could work as an intimate, small scale project, as well as a highly ambitious, potentially vast undertaking intended to be replicated elsewhere.
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Inspired by the need to render “the world a big forest, making towns and environments forest-like.”, Negotiating Routes: Ecologies of the Byways, is a 2 year project inviting reflection by artists on the anxiety of the ‘development’ embodied in the rank infrastructural development across India and its coexistence with local ecologicies. The Road Transport Ministry has chalked out an ambitious plan of the biggest public, private partnership whereby 15,000 km of roads and highways will be developed over the next three years across India, resulting in the golden corridors which will run north to south and east to west across the country. To expedite the implementation of over 165 projects under the National Highway Development Program (NHDP) during the year, steps have already been taken to put land acquisition on fast track, shifting of utilities, obtaining clearances and taking legal and police action against non-performing contractors and displaced villagers and tribals alike.

The Negotiating Routes – Ecologies of the Byways project invites artists, artists groups or professionals to propose projects, which are site-specific and have an inter-disciplinary approach combining research and art creation by artists and local communities. NR addresses the visible and invisible transformations currently taking place in immediate environments. The project will encourage archiving of local knowledge and mythologies about various ecologies like the flora, fauna, home remedies, stories and folk lores, as also the mark making of an artist by a specific action or project.

Over two years, Negotiating Routes hopes to map the various project sites across the country, to create an alternative road map where artists and communities have come together and have been involved in discussions on the regeneration of the local ecology of the cities or villages that they inhabit. Using the nomenclature of the National Highway or NH1, each site, ironically named NR1, NR2, will form the nodal points of this alternative mapping as they connect to each other metaphorically, a route ‘ marked’ by art where transfer and exchange of knowledge has taken place.

This project was initiated by Varsha Nair and is co curated by Pooja Sood at KHOJ.

https://khojworkshop.org/programme/negotiating-routes-ecologies-of-the-byways-i/