Thresholds In Tapestries
Everything is connected but as Richard Feynman said there is a difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. Humans know the name of everything in nature or at least have been naming unknown species of plants and animals for years but an average human does not know anything about them other than its name. They haven’t ever observed or actively pursued to know more about these species and organisms that live with us because they are busy working in closed spaces for the development of humanity and to make enough for daily sustenance. An average human in a city is more afraid of losing his job than the river near his house getting polluted because he doesn’t yet understand the importance of the river directly, due to loss of connection with nature around him. He doesn’t interact or depend on the river directly and so does not care about its importance. Humans need to empathise with nature and understand its needs. People in cities find alternative ways to keep themselves distracted from the daily stress of civilization and in search of these distractions they forget to think about the consequences of their actions. These man made distractions have had a toll on nature itself and even though nature could be the only distraction man needs to live a better life, he seeks for more material distractions in the end. The things we do in our daily life have huge impacts on our relationship with nature. This impact is not felt by humans at that particular instant and so, it is not taken seriously until nature starts retaliating by being unstable. The ecosystem is fragile and any grandiose changes to this system caused by us humans, results in loss of life all over the world without discriminating against species of animals or plants. Everything is affected by each other in every way and we fail to realise that on a daily basis. As much as we treat nature as a non-living thing, we should also realize that all life on earth is due to this ecosystem that is very much living. This behaviour towards nature needs to change at some point for us to survive as a species on this planet we call home. We certainly do not feel the importance of this planet being the only planet we know that can sustain life. Until we find another planet close enough, that sustains life, we need to take care of our home, our only home.
The Western Ghats have been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, one reason being its range in biodiversity. It acts as a threshold, intercepting the rain from the monsoon winds that arrive on the South Western coasts of India. The site’s high montane forest ecosystems influence the Indian monsoon weather pattern. This area is in state of constant dynamic flux in terms of cultural and biological aspects which is affected by the rain in these areas. There have been several perspectives on the portrayal of knowledge of biodiversity in these areas but there is a lack of holistic and creative documentation of this knowledge. There have been a lot of attempts at documenting the vast and diverse knowledge from the Western Ghats but there are few problems that arise while interacting with said knowledge. The knowledge presented is static in all senses and does not account for the constant dynamism and change in the Western Ghats There is a whole flux of information and visual blurriness at the boundary. There is an exchange of biodiversity at these boundaries that cannot be defined as clear marked areas. They are areas of constant change in biodiversity. Areas like mangroves are areas of flux between land and sea. They provide for both ecosystems while creating its own ecosystem to compliment the other two. How do you include them?
The need for the project
The PBR is a format of documentation that is linear in thought and also feels very static in terms of the articulation and communication of knowledge. As someone who’s reading it considering the sensitivity towards the subjects and nature of things, it feels like the PBR is the yellow pages of resources. Where the uses of different organisms and non-living biodiversity is listed as information that can be used for the better or worse. There are divisions made in the PBR formats for various different things but it has created gaps in between. For example, it might talk about the grasslands and forests separately or even combined but in both cases it does not account for where these two separate things meet. Where ecosystems exist in between the two so called divisions. They might have created boundaries to define certain areas but nowhere does anyone talk about what is happening at the boundary itself. The idea of a threshold is what is missing in these ways of documenting knowledge where the in between gets lost in translation.
Concept Note :
The Western Ghats and it;s activities are predominantly affected and constantly shaped by the rainduring the monsoon. The wetness that acts upon these places, blurs the boundaries between man and nature in various ways. From moss covering up walls to plants growing through cement, it creates a pallet of textures that carries vital information about a place. These textures are varied in themselves as wetness can have it;s own sub categorized texture depending on which state it is in and how it responds to everything around it. These textures give out unique sensations that evoke a certain response in a person. The process of feeling a texture and its sensation through a picture is part of recalling the same sensation which was felt previously in your life. These sensations are important in order to understand the quality of wetness and better understand the area through wetness itself. As Richard Feynman once said, “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Similarly the PBR does not account for the sensations or behavioral aspects of these various activities and species. Through my pictures these sensations, born through wetness acting on various things around it, have been captured to a certain extent. These pictures and videos are still separate from each other and do not tell a whole story in a frame and the idea of collage is to bring about narratives in a creative manner to create a new whole. Through collages that are dynamic in nature and the addition of text based information, this project aims to give a whole new perspective to how a place can be analyzed. Where textures and sensations involved are taken from different images of a particular place to create a new whole through it’s parts. Giving the audience a chance to actually stop, observe and know something as a whole.
