LA4007

Faculty: Divya Shah

Tracing lines

The studio considers Indian rural contexts and its present-day complexities through readings of the place, people, and their existence as its premise. This time, it confronted the rapidly disappearing wetlands and grasslands of the lacustrine territories of the Nal Sarovar region. The effects of this have disrupted the ecology, traditional economies, and cultures of associated rural communities. The studio process consisted of four stages based on Tim Ingold’s definition of traces, threads, knots, and weaves that led to tangible spatial procedures for imaging and imagining this ephemeral land-water binary and its associated cultural ecologies.

Stage 01, Traces, looked at reading and representing traces of the landscapes of a place diagrammatically. Stage 02, Threads, developed methods that looks beyond the seen and scene to engage the ecologies and people. Stage 03, Knots, consisted of the resultant readings leading to a conjectural stand that looked primarily at augmented landscape mosaics. Stage 04, Weaves, narrated the conceptual landscape position in terms of physical inserts and spatial progressions.

Fundamentally optimistic and emic in its approach, the studio attempted to propose a series of potential landscape inserts that were, creative and comprehensive models of resilience and adaptation, and could help local communities and their lands, thrive and endure the extreme temperaments they face, due to climate change crisis and tactless urbanization.