Social Witnessing
These two case studies, presented during The Shape of a Practice, explore two very different landscapes and the changing relationships that create them over time. Artist and researcher Ravi Agarwal and academic Paulina Lopez share an ongoing project that formulates personal memories of Agarwal’s desert homeland near the city of Jaisalmer. Following this, geographer Huiying Ng and urban farmer Michelle Lai focus on the urbanizing landscape of Chiang Mai, Thailand, and its relationship to alternative agroecology.
The Desert of the Anthropocene
With Ravi Agarwal & Paulina Lopez
Re-earthing through collective study: Finding a social semiotics of agroecological Futures
With Huiying Ng & Michelle Lai
Witnessing just how a changing landscape can develop is quite a difficult task; one that requires a number of different accounts, traces, and ways of documenting that can be difficult to pin down. These two case study presentations focus on two very different landscapes and attempt to account for the changing relationships that make them over time.
In this archived stream, recorded during The Shape of a Practice, geographer Huiying Ng renders a spatial ethnography of the urbanizing landscape of the Chiang Mai province of Thailand and their relationship to alternative agroecology. Through a compendium of images, archival materials, maps and videos, artist and researcher Ravi Agarwal shares an ongoing project that formulates personal memories of his desert homeland near the city of Jaisalmer, whose “barren” landscape has been forever altered as a result of a 650km canal running from the city to the Indus Valley in a post-colonial modernization process.