Speakers for this event

• 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

• Bureau d’études (Fr)

  Bureau d’études (Fr)

  Collective of artists

  Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt form the artist-duo Bureau d´études (Fr). For two decades, the group has been producing cartography of contemporary political, social and economic systems. In 2007 they co-founded the Laboratory Planet collective and journal with Ewen Chardronnet. For more than 15 years they are engaged in the Ferme de la Mhotte, a place outside the property located in center France, where a group of people organize their uses together to bring out a social project at the crossroads of culture, agriculture and education. Xavier Fourt and Léonore Bonaccini (member of the artists’ group Bureau d’études) have been active for more than 15 years in the territory, contributing to its development and structuring The School territory of the Valleys du Chamarron.

  https://bureaudetudes.org/
  https://laboratoryplanet.org/
  http://fermedelamhotte.fr/

  The School territory of the Valleys du Chamarron in the bocage is a prototype of a sustainable territory. In this territory of the future, which for the moment associates six entities, we are learning to live together by relying on a collective based on a collective approach started 45 years ago.

  Collective of artists

• 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. Rustam Vania (In)

  Dr. Rustam Vania (In)

  Designer

  Rustam Vania (In) is an Art and Design professional and academic Dean at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore since 2005. He has also been practicing Editorial and Publication Design in print and digital media.

  https://srishtimanipalinstitute.in/people/rustam-vania

  Designer

• George Clark (Uk) - Motherbank - with Ismal Muntaha et Bunga Siagian from Jatiwangi Art Factory (Idn)

  George Clark (Uk) - Motherbank - with Ismal Muntaha et Bunga Siagian from Jatiwangi Art Factory (Idn)

  Artist

  George Clark (Uk) is an artist, writer and curator. His work explores the history of images and how they are governed by culture, technology and social political conditions. Recent projects have sought to build new models of assembly, exhibition and moving image production. He is currently a Lecturer at the School of Art, University of Westminster. Founded in 2020 Mother Bank is a collective project to develop financial autonomy and collective action lead by mothers in the village of Wates in West Java.

  https://www.georgeandclark.com/mother-bank/
  https://jatiwangiartfactory.tumblr.com/

  Artist

• 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

• Laboratory for Ecology and Aesthetics (Dk)+ Aziza Hamel (Tn)

  Laboratory for Ecology and Aesthetics (Dk)+ Aziza Hamel (Tn)

  Curators

  Dea Antonsen (DK) and Ida Bencke (DK) are founders and curators of Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (LAE). LAE was established in 2014 as an independent curatorial and publishing platform for experimental, artistic and poetic work around shared exhaustion and collective healing in the intersection between social and ecological inequalities and solidarities. Dea Antonsen (MA) has previously worked as a curator at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art and as a guest teacher at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Ida Bencke is a PhD student at Copenhagen University with the research project OIKOS: Care and Crisis. Both Antonsen and Bencke are currently in-house curators at Center for Art and Mental Health. Aziza Harmel is a freelance curator and a writer based in Tunisia. She has previously worked as a curator assistant at Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), been a part of the curator team at Les Rencontres de Bamako, The African Biennale of Photography (Mali), been the curator of Qayyem – programme in curatorial research (Amman), a curatorial assistant at Steirischer Herbst (Graz), and a curatorial assistant in documenta 14 (Kassel and Athens).

  http://www.labae.org/

  Hosting Lands
  Hosting Lands is a slow-growing, decentral exhibition movement unfolding around belonging to land, the politics of hosting, and the creation of translocal alliances through community building, radical pedagogy and reparative practices. Over the course of three years, the exhibition will move between six locations throughout Denmark engaging artists, activists and communities. Hosting Lands explores questions of stewardship and care for land by (re)establishing commons, and by working in collective and regenerative site-responsive manners. Hosting Lands orients itself towards futures beyond the exhibition movement itself by offering transformative infrastructures of the everyday, and by seeking to ignite lasting change in the landscapes, communities and worlds at stake.

  https://hostinglands.com/english

  Curators

• Maya Minder (Ch)

  Maya Minder (Ch)

  Following the Biohacker, Maker and Thirdspace movements, Zurich based Maya Minder uses grassroots ideas, safe zones and citizen science to enable collective story telling through food and cooking. After studying Art history at the University of Zurich and Fine Arts at Zurich University of Arts, she has been co-curating and organizing projects independently or within the International Hackteria Society. Within her Green Open Food Evolution project she creates entanglements between human commodities and animism of nature. “Cooking transforms us” is a framework Minder weaves like a strings through her work. Cooking serves her to reveal the metaphor of the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture, fostering evolutionary ideas of a symbiotic co-existence between plants, animals and humans.

• Meena Vari (In)

  Meena Vari (In)

  Artistic Coordinator

  Meena Vari (In) is the Dean at the School of Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (www.srishtimanipalinstitute.in). She coordinates activities of the Center for Experimental Media &Arts (CEMA) and works closely with artists to develop the practice of Contemporary arts in Srishti and outside. Since 2004, she has been curating an annual international project called ‘Srishti Interim – Festival of Ideas & Performance’ by inviting Contemporary artists from around the world. Soil Assembly is one of the projects initiated during the Srishti Interim 2023.

  Artistic Coordinator

• Nora Hauswirth – Arte & Escola Na Floresta - Tera Kuno (Ch/Bra)

  Nora Hauswirth – Arte & Escola Na Floresta - Tera Kuno (Ch/Bra)

  Artists

  Nora Hauswirth is a cultural producer with a master’s degree in Curatorship at ZHDK, Zurich University of the Arts. In Switzerland, she worked for several museums, exhibitions and intercultural projects, such as Cabaret Voltaire, Manifesta 11, Openki.net, etc. Since 2017, she is researching about sustainable agriculture and supply systems, and therefore was traveling during 2 years to native communities in the north and northeast of Brazil using a van as a mobile exhibition structure and seed bank. Since 2019, she contributes for Participative Agriculture Movement in the Amazon.

  In the face of the current ecological paradigm, amidst climate change, monocultures and ultra-processed foods, the movement “Art & School in the Forest” has been proposing since 2020 a reflection on the care with the land and with people, as well as food, in an artistic and and agro-ecological immersion. Through participative agricultural projects, the collective bridges consumption habits responding to the possibilities of what can be grown locally, promoting a circular system based on planting, harvesting and cooking. The goal is to stimulate individual and collective initiative through artistic and cultural projects in a society characterized by collectivism.

  http://www.terakuno.org
  https://www.instagram.com/arteescolanafloresta/

  Artists

• Pauline Gillard – Les Jardins Suspendus - Belfort Art School (Fr)

  Pauline Gillard – Les Jardins Suspendus - Belfort Art School (Fr)

  Artistic director

  Pauline Gillard is currently teaching the program of “Applied Ecology in Art Education” at the Belfort’s Art’s School. She is also the head of the cultural program and the school’s monitoring system. In 2017, she developed the project of the “Micro-Farms” for the city of Besançon. Since 2011, Pauline has been the artistic director of the association “Intermèdes Géographiques”, a structure dedicated to the realization of works of art in the public space and territorial matters. She has also taught at the National School of Dairy Industry and Biotechnology (ENILBIO) in the field of socio-culture.

  Visual arts, Plastic arts and earth cultivation : an educational experience
  For the first time in France in an art school, awareness of ecological issues is integrated into all our courses. Students have several ways to do this. They can work on the land during certain workshops, and they also have theoretical courses on biology and the living. This particularity aims to create in these future artists a different relationship to the world through biology, history, science, philosophy, agriculture and gardening. After a full year, they can develop an autonomy on how growing a culture and imagine a different future.

  https://www.ecole-art-belfort.fr/les-jardins-suspendus/

  Artistic director

• 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

• School of Soil Futures (Id/Uk)

  School of Soil Futures (Id/Uk)

  Online initiative by Struggles for Sovereignty (Id) and Arts Catalyst (Uk)

  The School of Soil Futures is an online initiative co-organised by Struggles for Sovereignty (ID) and Arts Catalyst (UK) that brings together on Zoom, artists, ecological activists, community organisers, soil caretakers and others working on social and ecological justice from across the world. The School is part of Soil Futures, a network of creative organisations that explores the ground between us. The network is a collaboration between five organisations: Arts Catalyst (Sheffield, UK); RIWAQ (al Bireh, Palestine); Sakiya – Art/Science/Agriculture (Ein Qiniya, Palestine); Struggles for Sovereignty (Yogyakarta, Indonesia); and Vessel Art Project (Puglia, Italy).

  During the talk, members of Struggles for Sovereignty Gatari Surya Kusuma and Sanne Oorthuizen and Arts Catalyst’s Curator Anna Santomauro will introduce the School of Soil Futures, a collaborative translocal initiative taking place online between March and May 2023. The School of Soil Futures sees soil as friend and kin, as a dynamic living being or network of beings, with whom we want to work in solidarity to better understand what ecologically just ways of inhabiting the earth there might be in diverse territories. Through the School we hope to nurture an exchange of situated practices among those who look after and care for soils. This will encompass a multiplicity of perspectives and relations: from the microbiological dimension to land-based practices, from acts of reparation and healing, to modes of resistance and storytelling.

  Online initiative by Struggles for Sovereignty (Id) and Arts Catalyst (Uk)

• 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

• Vivek Vilasini (In)

  Vivek Vilasini (In)

  Artist

  Vivek Vilasini (In) is a multimedia artist, trained as a Radio Officer at the All India Marine College, Kerala, India and then in sculptural practices from traditional craftspeople. His artistic intervention of ‘Munnar food forest’ to address society’s everyday concerns about food and water started off in 2008. Vivek’s works has been shown at numerous international exhibitions and festivals. Vivek’s Munnar food forest is one of the first inspirations of this soil assembly.

  Artist