Vincent Chomaz & Edgar Kandratian
bangaloREsidents@Pepper House

© Vincent Chomaz

Vincent Chomaz is an artist and cultural operator interested in informal and collaborative forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Spanning installation, interventions, workshops, and formats of co-production, his work focuses on listening as a critical practice – an associative and empathic tool which can bridge conscious and unconscious knowledge to investigate collective dynamics and histories as a network of individual experiences.

© Edgar Kandratian

Edgar Kandratian is a graphic designer and project initiator whose work centres on scenography and communication in the field of visual and conceptual art. Best described as translational, his design practice takes an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to devise
culture identities. Over the years, he has worked with various cultural institutions throughout Germany, such as the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Stuftung Bauhaus Dessau.




Conceived as a speculative research of what the future could bring, When the Sea Rises, the project of Edgar Kandratian and Vincent Chomaz for their bangaloREsidency, takes the form of a multi-week walk along what could become the coastline of the Lakshadweep Sea.

In contradiction to the ambitions of early Land artists, When the Sea Rises does not conceive walking as an aesthetic approach but, rather, as an embodied mode of investigation and mean of producing a body of situated knowledge.

Informed by the recent data and the interactive map of “Land projected to be below tideline in 2050” published by Climate Central, their walk will follow the coastline that will emerge in 2050 between Kochi, Koyattam, and Alappuzha. Under this hypothetical, future seashore, Vincent and Edgar will work to uncover the strata of what will be lost to changing climate conditions – to sea rise, increased level of precipitations, and flooding.

What will be lost? What could be gained? What would become of the affected communities and the surrounding landscapes? Of their everyday soundscapes? How can we read and imagine a landscape that is yet to come?

Along the walk, they will document the sounds and realities of a land that will be submerged and transformed. A point to devise temporary interventions but also encounter the communities affected, conduct speculative interviews of local residents, and discuss with them how they understand their future.

When the Sea Rises is intended to be open to other, local practitioners – artists, cultural practitioners, and scientists that would be interested to understand and document the histories at stake.

The project is developed by Edgar Kandratian and Vincent Chomaz as part of their ongoing and open format collaboration, what we hear. Started in 2017 in Berlin, what we hear emerged from their shared interest for listening and its politics. Their collaboration embraces subjective empathy and different modes of embodied exploration – acts such as walking and listening – as methods of artistic research.