RESEARCH
This research work is driven by engaging in the field through the meta-practice of walking, a movement art that allows a way of seeing and reading places as an inhabitant. It is a way of recording and understanding the complexity of the environment, simultaneously including the transcorporeal self in the milieu. These multi-species and material relations in the Panchagangavali watery lands are held in situated vocabularies - kunda (mound), kudru (river island), and koodugrama (gathering place). They hold knowledge of temporal places, material practices, kinships and ways of reading the world that sustain interdependencies between livelihoods and everyday practices, and their ecologies.
Seeing through Seepage
I bring to this research a way of working in soaking ecologies, and the human and more-than-human communities that dwell in them, through practice-research. Situated across the Panchagangavali Estuary region, the aim is to respond to contemporary environmental conflicts, of climate change, loss of material knowledge and increasing development pressures, through a transdisciplinary approach and situated creative practices, in order to privilege cultural practices and local knowledge that hold nature-culture correspondences.
We explore speculative ways of situating, visualising, and engaging in complex environments. This creative approach is intended to expose the nature of places and construct new understandings of resilient relations, working through a ground engagement. We work through creative methods, structured by walking, gathering multiple places, fields of practices, and diverse knowledge-making processes. The nature of this research rests on collaborations and context-responsivity.
Kunda
'Kunda' in Kundagannada means mound or high ground. It is surrounded by wateriness of diverse kinds including marshes, wetlands, paddy fields, aquaculture, backwaters and lagoons, mangrove forests, streams, channels, canals, tanks, and the Arabian Sea. These grounds hold multiple practices, human and more-than-human, including cultivating, harvesting, migrating, growing, decaying, feeding, breeding, brooding, seeping, soaking, firing, fishing, sharing, cooperating, and dwelling.
Kudru
'Kudru' in Kannada translates into 'river island'. Kudrus are temporal formations along waters that move from the Western Ghat mountains to the Arabian Sea. During the monsoon rains, waters carry with them matter and material that sediment as they move through the coastal plains towards the estuary. Kudrus are characterised by riparian edges that shape-shift with the moving waters. Human inhabitants work with this watery flux, following lunar movement for their everyday practices and livelihoods. When the nere comes, in some kudrus people shift to moving by boat through the innumerous channels that criss-cross this aquapelago. Today, some have hardened their edges, stilling the islands, claiming land.
Koodugrama
'Koodugrama' in Kannada means a place of connections and gatherings. In the Panchagangavali estuarine region lies koodugrama, or the ancient port town of Basruru. During its Portuguese occupation, in the 16th Century, Basruru was a thriving hub of trade, exporting rice and pepper among other valuable commodities. The port town, the nearby villages and surrounding hamlets were interdependent, with exchanges in local markets and with the Portuguese. Basruru was also a place of high culture including performing arts, such as bylatta, poetry, dance, philosophy, and ancient temples and surangas (water tunnels). Today, Basruru is a quiet heritage town, with memories, and remnants of epigraphs, old mud houses and an ancient kere system. The threat of development nearby.
