framework

What does it mean to read a landscape? What does it mean to belong to it?
What necessitates enquiries into the agrarian today?

In the heavy verses of his poem, ‘The Almanac of Time,’ poet Dylan Thomas conveys in dark undertones the inevitabilities of human existence. Each revolution of the earth around the sun, each shift of season, every rolling week is both creatively and destructively construed, carrying the permanence of change and the impermanence of belonging. Known for his lyrical, emotional poetry, Thomas had a keen sense of articulating the effects of time on the human condition, writing extensively about the poesy of ageing and the growth of consciousness that accompanied it. He was also particularly interested in how the anatomy of the human body compared to the universe itself - micro- and macrocosmic entities, swallowing each other whole - and how, if at all, they could learn from each other.
The anticipation of inevitability is central to our understanding of the external world, and as we grapple with new forms of uncertainties, we find different ways to accommodate precarity in our lives, imbuing our encounters, ambitions and predictions with an undeterred persistence. How do we make sense of what we experience? Who learns from whom, and how are resistances articulated?

Approaching one such inconceivable expanse, in an attempt to think and behold in some form its reverberations, relevances and reformations, we envisioned the AgriForum as a space for presenting and gathering contemporary enquiries into the agrarian. A forum for artists working with the agrarian across media, form and function, it seeks to encourage processes of sharing and accumulation, drawing into its fray various vocabularies at the intersections of artistic practice and agriculture. FICA outlines the AgriForum as responding to a necessity in the field in its attempt to create a network of locally-rooted practitioners from different locations, inviting them to read and discuss together the concerns they share. Positioning this act of convening within a virtual space of convergence, criticality and dissemination, the AgriForum seeks to amplify socio-political and cultural issues at hand, including but not limited to themes around sustainability, the environment, food security and our relationship to natural resources.

Bringing together a small group of participants who engage with the agrarian through a lens of the artistic, the AgriForum is contextualised by their efforts to express and engage with the political urgencies that imbue the agrarian today. Our participants in this phase of the AgriForum are linked by a powerful commonality in their imaginations of the agrarian, namely one where the nature of the site is challenged and placed outside conventional delimitations and one-dimensional approaches to defining it. Their practices activate indigenous knowledge systems, modes of being, community engagement, collective resistances, farming practices, and ecological perspectives in powerful, reinventive ways. Collaboratively rerouting their own materials, methodologies and experiences, the AgriForum wishes to mould, harness and share conceptual understandings around agriculture and its associated discourses, fostering new tangents of interactions with other interlocutors.

The forum also emerges from the work undertaken by FICA via our annual grants, workshops and collaborations with artists whose practices remained centred on and located within agrarian issues. In 2016, Gram Art Project, a collective working in Paradsinga village on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, was supported by the Public Art Grant which culminated in a Land Art Festival. Through the year, the various members of the collective developed engagements with farming, water conservation, local communities, seeds and seed conservation through mediums of performances, songs, food and festivals. Dharmendra Prasad, an artist whose practice is focused on developing agricultural vocabularies of care, community, ecological repair and education, received the Emerging Artist Award in 2019. His project, ‘Carebiosphere,’ is supported by the Award and studies the manufacture of sites and languages of care, looking at indigenous knowledge systems, agrarian ideas, oralities, folklore and environments to create fresh occupational branches around life. FICA co-organises the Students’ Biennale with the Kochi Biennale Foundation, and our exhibitions, workshops and courses assimilate young artists and graduates who are deeply connected to the agrarian via their own family backgrounds and their lived experiences, and are grappling with finding modes of expression within their practices.

There has been a need to grow and develop sensitivities to the various farmer movements and protests that have taken place over the past few years as well as those that we are currently witnessing. These forms of resistance have spotlighted several pressing urgencies at hand accompanied by the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, and they have foregrounded multiple crises that threaten to overwhelm. Many young artists had to return to their villages during the pandemic to support their families; several experienced isolation due to the lack of mobility and the imminent distance being created, especially as the spaces that sites of education had provided them with seemed to have disappeared, leaving them without enough resources and support.

Five Million Incidents, a curatorial project instigated by Raqs Media Collective in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan, also gave us the space to bring together practitioners and consider modes of collective formation, and knowledge networks that extended beyond the human, to consider nature, animal, plant and other non-human elements. An additional development is the upcoming Documenta 15 which is slated for 2022, helmed by the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa. The curators have chosen the Indonesian word Lumbung as one of the foundational concepts for exhibition, a word that translates as a collectively governed rice-barn where harvested goods are stored for the community. Exploring this idea of pooled together resources, Documenta 15 will think through the centrality of shared values, collective rituals and organizational principles that govern our contemporary moment.

Initiating this phase of the AgriForum, we invite you to read alongside, against and within; silently, annotatively and discursively. A space of convivium, the Forum grows as we think through and around the agrarian as site and concept, resistance and coevality, material and medium. Apart from acts of reading, the AgriForum will also construe acts of assimilation - of sources, archives, responses, stimuli - as formative for possible further phases of the AgriForum. Through such assimilation, the Forum aims to be able to pool together material and thought to create fertile ground for possible individual projects and potential collaborations. This forum hopes to move beyond an instructional format, and would instead invite you to consider ways and means of reading alongside each other's practices and pursuits, responding with references of their own to bolster, contest, challenge and /or deconstruct available ideas and concepts around the agrarian, while also thinking about the applicability of the same to your own bodies of work.

The AgriForum will attempt to think through the intertextuality made evident by this group of participants and their practices. It hopes to study possible new ways of revisiting and rethinking the material stemming from this form through critical writing, curatorial approaches and artistic research, while also streamlining references to mobilise critical reflections on the agrarian as an urgency, a landscape of encounter and experience in itself.