Field Notes for a Future Commons | A Symposium on Art and Ecology

Saturday, 6 September 2025, 10:30-18:30
Registrations open The symposium, Field Notes for a Future Commons, will bring together key conversants in the field of contemporary art and creative practices. Travelling Plants began as a residency at the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP) with artists Karolina Grzywnowicz, Wendy Therméa, Waylon D’Souza, and Rashmimala, whose practices engage deeply with ecological subjects. The exhibition draws on their diverse research lenses and creative processes to reflect sociocultural, political, and environmental concerns. Rooted in the idea of “traveling plants” across history—from continental drift to colonial expansion and climate upheavals—the exhibition reflects on the entanglement of plant and human histories, and on the languages and value systems needed to imagine different futures.

Field Notes for a Future Commons is imagined as an activation in response to these enquiries, opening up a space of dialogue across artistic, ecological, and site-specific perspectives. It extends FICA’s ongoing engagements through the AgriForum—our platform for exploring artistic practices in relation to the agrarian. While Travelling Plants foregrounds histories of plant life and its entanglement with human trajectories, the symposium seeks to invite into the fray other expanded vocabularies of site, identity, materiality, kinship, and speculation. We aim to platform how creative practices are imagining alternative pedagogies and futures as ways to understand our relationship with the natural world, amidst the urgencies of the contemporary moment. In doing so, this constellation of voices becomes a vital addition to the journey of Traveling Plants, and to FICA’s assimilations, extending these resonances into broader, interdisciplinary arenas.
 
Sessions and speakers include:

10:30-11:00
Registration and Tea

11:00-11:15
Introduction

11:15-12:15
Keynote address by Sopan Joshi

12:15-13:45
Panel I 
Root, ruderal, residue: Practices along the material edge
Speakers: Rashmimala, Gopa Trivedi, Kumar Misal
Moderation: Annalisa Mansukhani

Abstract: This panel examines how artistic practices engage with material vocabularies to reframe the ways we understand ecologies, histories, and everyday life. Plants, fibres, and fragments of memory become active agents through which narratives of displacement, discard, otherness, and transformation are re-read and re-written. Working across painting, printmaking, sculptural form, and archival research, the practices at hand draw attention to overlooked, ordinary, and marginal forms—ruderal species growing through cracks in concrete, domestic objects and spaces imbued with metaphor, paper and print lifted from agricultural residue—positioning them as critical sites of knowledge and testimony. Through acts of layering, citation, and process-driven making, these practices unsettle conventional taxonomies to spotlight new intersections between material exploration and artistic development. The conversants here hold and reformulate the many histories of colonial encounter, the shape of cultural memory, and the image of the agrarian expanse; in doing so, they reposition material, metaphor and method as vital modes of reckoning with the complexities of socio-ecological precarity and change.

13:45-14:45
Lunch

14:45-15:45
A conversation between Kush Sethi, Anish Cherian, and Padmanabhan

15:45-16:00
Tea Break

16:00-17:00
An artist presentation by Maria Thereza Alves (online)

17:00-18:30
Panel II
Cartographies otherwise: Site and speculative futures
Speakers: Soujanyaa Boruah, Sarika Goswami, Malavika Bhatia
Moderation: Vidya Shivadas

Abstract: This panel brings together practices that think with site as both ground and proposition, and with speculative futures as a way to reimagine our relationships with more-than-human worlds. Through participatory, research-based, collaborative, and immersive methods, the practices here trace alternative cartographies that extend beyond conventional mappings of landscape, resource, or identity, tilting instead to more relational modes of knowing and making. At stake are questions of how we navigate ecological breakdown, socio-cultural tension, and climate uncertainty, and how these reshape the ways we understand place, memory, and survival. Working across mycological kinships, community dialogue, and intergenerational knowledge, the conversants attend to the interstitial and the in-between as conditions through which sustained dialogues with site and context emerge. They mobilise frameworks that bring together representation, pedagogy, encounter, and process, asking: how might creative practice chart futures otherwise, where site becomes both archive and horizon, and where the act of mapping is inseparable from acts of care, collaboration, and co-imagination?

18:30
Closing Remarks