Agri-Cultures & Elemental Exchanges

Agri-Cultures & Elemental Exchanges is a creative research project, using the tools of media and artistic investigation to contextualize, focus awareness of and intervene in the exchanges that humans and nonhumans make with the planet in the production of food and sustenance.

The project takes the principles of environmental, ecological and natural economics, and investigations into how people are attempting to exchange with ecosystems. We ask: How can we unearth the long history of beings exchanging with their environments while avoiding becoming over-economized, quantified and anthropocentric? How might we learn from and respect the traditions and intimacies of metabolic relations, while taking advantage of newer technologies that may aid in the tracing and representing of the material and energetic exchanges sustaining life? What new developments, designs, technologies and cultural techniques might make more equitable and sustainable the continuous metabolic exchanges that need to take place between humans, nonhumans, urban, rural, productive and consumptive beings?

The project undertakes fieldwork with partners in India, interactions with student groups at Anant University, and a fieldworkshop in the Bengaluru area.