Lecture
Artificial Ecology - Ashok Sukumaran
Discussants: Ravi Agarwal & Rhea Shah
Drawing on Himalayan colonial and horticultural history, a bag made from umbrella cloth, potato science, and recent experiences with South Asia-wide infrastructure projects, the artist and CAMP co-founder Ashok Sukumaran's part-biographical talk is about the creative spirit that is unleashed when we dare to think of our environments unnaturally. When nature and culture are not separate in our heads, then Nature (already politicised, concretised, plasticised, romanticised, and exhausted) is no longer the grand unchanging backdrop or even ultimate aim of what we may want, ecologically speaking. What could we want instead?
This challenge is about thinking and building on the other side of "resistance", with more synthetic, more pleasurable, more careful and more equitable ways to engage with our current time. And to nurture things that Nature never knew existed... without past hubris and with new tools? The artificial part of the title relates to art, and what it could be doing in 2020, which is one of the concluding suggestions of the talk.
If Nature is unjust, change Nature. - xenofeminist manifesto.
(This talk is a much-expanded version of a 10 minute presentation Ashok gave at the State of Nature conference in 2018)
Short Biography:
- Rhea Shah is an architect and co-founder of a practice, The Drawing Room. She has previously worked in publication design and film curation and taught at KRVIA, Mumbai. She recently graduated with a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Her thesis research looks to forests to re-imagine landscape design through indigenous material practices – enabling intervention in time rather than geographical space.