Speakers for this event

• A Growing Culture (Us)

  A Growing Culture (Us)

  Organization

  A growing culture is a radical storytelling organisation committed to confronting unjust power in the food system, in the fight for global food sovereignty. Loren works to shift public perceptions of those who produce the world’s food. He believes in farmers having a prominent seat at the table — a seat threatened by industrial agriculture. He is the founder an Executive Director of AGC, and has earned recognition for his contributions to ecological agriculture. Rohan is a human rights activist in India, working as a writer and researcher at A Growing Culture. He’s passionate about working with radical peasant and worker struggles towards revolutionary praxis. His interests are in contributing to research-led storytelling to challenge dominant narratives and strengthen the case for food sovereignty everywhere.

  The dominant narrative around agriculture is centred around the need for food security. It tells us that in order to solve world hunger and to be food secure, we must apply scientific methods and improve crop yield to produce more food than ever before. But what if we told you that we already have more than enough food to go around? What if we told you that food security alone can never defeat hunger? What if we told you that hunger is merely a symptom of a much greater injustice, and the only way to weed it out is to confront legacies of power?

  https://www.agrowingculture.org/

  Organization

• Aastha Chauhan (In)

  Aastha Chauhan (In)

  Artist

  Aastha Chauhan (In) is an artist and curator known for her public art and community engagement projects in New Delhi, particularly in the urban village of Khirkee. She’s currently teaching Curating Public/Community Art projects at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She’s board member of the Henvalvani Community Radio station, a project started as a youth initiative in 2001, in the Himalayan district of Chamba, Uttarakhand. An area which is home to historical, feminist, environmental movements such as the Chipko movement (Tree huggers) and Beej Bachao Andolan (save the (organic seed).

  https://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/people/aastha-chauhan

  https://henvalvani.wordpress.com/

  https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/chipko-an-unfinished-mission-30883

  Artist

• Cascoland (Nl)

  Cascoland (Nl)

  Artistic projects

  Cascoland (Nl) projects are initiated by Fiona de Bell and Roel Schoenmakers and executed with multi-disciplinary teams of creatives. They are aimed at the development of an ecological and social sustainable society, locally and globally. Since 2004 Cascoland has worked on projects in The Netherlands, South Africa, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Palestine, Egypt, Japan and in several countries in Europe and recently at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.

  http://cascoland.com/

  Artistic projects

• Dr. Rob La Frenais (Fr/Uk)

  Dr. Rob La Frenais (Fr/Uk)

  Curator

  Dr. Rob La Frenais (Fr/UK) has been a contemporary art curator for 35 years, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions. He has recently curated exhibitions in the US, Scotland, France, Liverpool and Doncaster, UK, Mexico,Taiwan and India. From 1997-2014, Rob was the curator of The Arts Catalyst (UK). He co-founded the Future of Transportation project at Srishti Institute, Bangalore in 2014, involving co-curating projects at KMB in the last two editions. He is a regular writer for Art Monthly, UK, and Makery.info (Fr) and recently co-edited the book Space Without Rockets.

  http://roblafrenais.info/

  Future of Transportation is an informal movement that looks at playful and slightly subversive bottom-up ways to solve the world’s transport problems. Founded at Srishti in 2014 by Rob La Frenais, Meena Vari and the late Sudipto Dasgupta, it involved radical strategies like holding classes on a suburban train on the outskirts of Bangalore and closing streets to traffic around the college in The Streets Belong to People. Working with international artists such as Tania Candiani from Mexico, Future of Transportation presented a collateral pavilion at a previous Kochi Biennale. It is also an active Facebook group with 3200 members.

  Curator

• Gabriel N. Gee (Fr/Ch)

  Gabriel N. Gee (Fr/Ch)

  Researcher

  Gabriel N. Gee is Associate Professor in Art History at Franklin University, Switzerland. His current research interests rooted in contemporary aesthetics looks at the changing imaginaries of our interconnected global cultures, in particular through industrial heritage, port cities, and natural environments, with particular case studies in Europe and Southeast Asia, paying attention to the potential of artistic research to open new spaces for cultural dialogue and innovation. Recent publications include a co-edited volume on Mobile Soils (TETI Press, 2021), and on “Maritime Poetics: from coast to hinterland” (Transcript Verlag 2021). Gabriel co-founded TETI Group in 2011, and guides the group’s activities to this day.

  Notes on the Migration of recipes and their containers
  On a marina in the port of Valencia, Spain, a little café offers drinks and tapas to boat owners and passers-by, sardines a la Plancha, grilled piments, but also cod croquettes fried in oil. Cod recipes can be traced back to the cuisine of numerous Southern European port cities, no least that of Genoa, Venice, and Lisbon. Yet the catch itself has long needed increasingly distant transportation to fill the desire of local clientèles. The café itself is charmingly improvised in a repurposed shipping container, a symbol of maritime globalisation associated with growing ecological pressure, which the nearby terminal towering above the scene anchors in tangible reality. This brief reflection aims to consider the imbrication of migration in culinary traditions in parallel to the vehicles of food transportation, from the amphora to the shipping container, considered in their ambiguous potentials as global agents.

  Researcher

• Hackteria (Intl)

  Hackteria (Intl)

  Web platform

  Hackteria is a web platform and collection of Open Source Biological Art Projects instigated in February 2009 by Andy Gracie (Uk), Marc Dusseiller (Ch) and Yashas Shetty (In), after collaboration during the Interactivos?09 Garage Science at Medialab Prado in Madrid. The aim of the project is to develop a rich wiki-based web resource for people interested in or developing projects that involve bioart, open source software/hardware, DIY biology, art/science collaborations and electronic experimentation.

  https://www.hackteria.org/

  Web platform

• Kush Sethi (In)

  Kush Sethi (In)

  Ecological gardener

  Kush Sethi (In) is an ecological gardener and forager based out of Delhi. Inspired by resilient forest ecosystems, his practice seeks to understand problems in manicured urban horticulture formats and find wilder, self-sustainable approaches. Lately, he has consulted Arts and Culture institutes on designing Sustainability Projects for local communities such as with Deutsches Museum Munich (Germany, 2020), Site Gallery Sheffield (UK, 2021), KultureForum WItten (Germany, 2022) and Ubersee-Museum(Germany, ongoing).

  Ecological gardener

• Margaux Schwab - Food Culture Days (Ch)

  Margaux Schwab - Food Culture Days (Ch)

  Curator

  Margaux Schwab (Ch/Mx, 1989) lives and works between Berlin, Germany, and Vevey, Switzerland. She is a cultural producer and curator working at the intersection of art, ecology and hospitality, prioritizing spaces outside the gallery context. In 2016, she founded foodculture days, a knowledge-sharing platform around food ecologies and politics. foodculture days serves as a catalyst for discussions and actions through environmental and social claims, employing a biennale format that hosts a multitude of creative and culinary interventions in Vevey.

  foodculture days is a platform based in Vevey (Switzerland) interested in the intrinsic link between food and ecology trough artistic and creative practices. At a time when environmental and social issues affect an ever-increasing number of living organisms, our collective consciousness attempts to comprehend these matters. Following this ethos, foodculture days proposes moments of encounter where the vitality of our entanglements and the plurality of experiences can co-exist and be made visible. Through democratic and mostly free of cost formats, such as exhibitions, performances, interventions in public space, radio shows, street newspaper publishing, screenings and collective meals outside of the institutional context, foodculture days days wishes to be a space for exchange of knowledge and know-hows that apprehends global topics rooted in a local context.

  www.foodculturedays.com

  Curator

• Ravi Agarwal (In)

  Ravi Agarwal (In)

  Artist

  Ravi Agarwal has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, environmental campaigner, writer, and curator. He has shown widely, including at the Biennials of Habana (2019), Yinchuan (2018), Kochi (2016), Documenta XI (2002), Sharjah Biennial (2013) etc., and curated several large shows (New Natures, A terrible beauty is born – Goethe Institute and CSMVS Museum, Mumbai, Imagined Documents – Les Recontres d’ Arles 2022). He has authored and edited books and journals (The Crisis of Climate Change, Routledge, 2021; Embrace Our Rivers – Kerber, 2017, Marg- Art and Ecology issue – April 2020). Ravi is also the founder and Director of the environmental NGO Toxics Link and recipient of the UN Award for Chemical Safety and Ashoka Fellowship.

  www.raviagarwal.com
  www.toxicslink.org
  www.sharedecologies.org

  Ecologies in Transition
  The talk will present some of my long-term engagements as an artist and environmentalist, with human and more-than-human communities which live in and with fragile landscapes and are becoming increasingly marginalized. These include traditional fishers living off the Bay of Bengal on the Tamilnadu coast, marigold farmers on the urban river floodplains in Delhi, and the nearly extinct South Asian vulture. These explorations attempt to delve into complex relationships of nature-cultures, and their new confrontations with inter-meshed global-local imaginaries and materialities.

  Artist

• Suresh Kumar G. (In)

  Suresh Kumar G. (In)

  Artist

  Suresh Kumar G. (In) is a Bangalore-based visual artist, who in recent years has worked with performance and community-based arts practices.
  Suresh’s work throughout his artistic career deconstructs the narrative topics of both, India’s first modernity and the second, revealing the fissures and discontinuities between the promises and reality: city and village, agriculture and industry, old and the new working in harmony to build a new India. Sarjapura Curries is home grown project of Suresh Kumar G. It has been his dream project since he was a little boy, who visited his maternal grandparents’ Village in sub-urban Bangalore known as Sarjapura.

  https://www.farmizen.com/sarjapura-curries/

  Artist

• Time’s Up (At)

  Time’s Up (At)

  Artist-Collective

  Time’s Up is an Austrian organisation investigating the future everyday. Time’s Up creates explorable spaces in the context of possible futures, building physical stories that explore contemporary sociopolitical issues. Intrinsically transdisciplinary, their practice incorporates reflections within sociology, appropriate technology, economics, social justice, oceans, agriculture, the sciences and the arts. Recent work has included the experiential future physical narrative Turnton, prefigurative sail freight experiments, the future history of a SleepCoin and speculative AI-human scientific ocean exploration.
  Further information about our past and current activities, research processes and results can be found at:

  https://www.timesup.org

  In our talk we will look at some of the emerging networks of smaller traders operating at the fossil fuel free end of the shipping spectrum. Confronting the race to the bottom process of cheap everything, these activists, leveraging systems such as community supported supplies, permaculture and new economic models, are building trading and transport networks that seek to avoid the issues of climate crisis. Prefiguring the new economies as a form of hands on activism, these networks are opening ways to a new ecology of transport and trade. We will also dive into our work with prefiguring and imagining forms of this change, how the developments of sustainable networks might impact everyday life.

  Artist-Collective