Almanac of An Eroded land borrowed from our children
Hand loomed textile processed in organic dye, Metal structure, Eroded soil, Indigo, Hay, Hand written poem on a old diary page 2022-23
Partly commissioned and co-produced by Samdani Art Foundation for Dhaka Art Summit 2023
340 x 709 x 709 (Dimension variable)
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‘Blocked’ is a form of protest that indigenous and marginalised local people use to rescue their lands, rivers and natural resources from authoritarian corporations. However precarious this resistance might be, their statement is clear and powerful enough to be visible. Inspired by their actions - and reflecting on how the navigability of the rivers from the upper stream to the lower stream in the Bengal delta region has been controlled, politicised, redistributed and transformed in the last decades - Sohorab addresses the aftermaths of human-led catastrophes. Alongside, he engages with the everyday practices of the people in the region in terms of their respect for natural ecosystems and their resistance towards the ‘patchy Anthropocene’.
Almanac of an eroded land borrowed from our children continues Sohorab’s interest in channelling the geopolitical, topographical and ethnocultural transformation of the river delta region of South Asia. In this new installation, fragmented ‘edifices’ traced from the blueprint of dams and barrages built on the ‘Teesta’ river conjure up an abandoned eroded site. Hand loomed textiles made using non-toxic natural dye processes with domestic ingredients, techniques learned from local people, create a muted yet strong atmospheric spatial intervention. Injecting the idea of ‘blocked’ in a prudent sculptural and material play, Sohorab draws attention to the urgent need to protect natural resources and indigenous knowledge, beyond human possibilities and interspecies entanglements.
This indigo dyed blue structure on the eroded land is an almanac which records the non linear time through different phases of the moon. Its also hiding a time capsule behind it in the installation that contains an image of layered wetland - a farmers dream for making seedbed from the past and the protest that is happening at present and being hopeful for the future. Those metal structure could symbolise the unwanted gentrification and the shadows conjure upon the trauma of the capitalist ruin.
In combination with fabric and its translucency in thin metal structures giving physicality to lights and the textile works as a container for it.
All the blue colours used in this installation came from Organic Indigo Leaves. Indigo has a very significant anti colonial connotation in the south asian context. Farmers had to cultivate Indigo in their lands against their will under British colonial regime. Indigo revolt was one of the earliest and most important anti colonial revolt against the British colony. Those highly patterned and almost weightless structures alter the heavy patriarchal concrete construction of Dams and barrages into a powerless one and bring back the concentration on the marginalised people. This way there could be a rhetoric with power structure and hierarchy.
Hand written poem on a diary page from 1986 loosely hung on top of a photograph showing a layered wetland reminiscing a time capsule that connects farmers dream from the past and protest of the present and hope for a sustainable ecological future.
