Outlook in conversation with Ravi Agarwal, whose work "Rhizome" (2015) is featured on the cover of our latest issue, "Climate Injustice." Combining art and activism, Agarwal explores the complex relationship between nature and its future through photography, video, text, and installation.
Most of his works revolve around decentering human beings from the understanding of ecology and discussing the superior position we as a species have placed ourselves in. His works have been featured in the Kochi, Sharjah, and Havana Biennials.
Reporter: Rani Jana
Camera: Vikram Sharma
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#ClimateInjustice #RaviAgarwal #ArtAndActivism #Rhizome2015 #NatureAndFuture #EnvironmentalArt #ClimateChange #SustainableArt #ArtForChange #Photography #VideoArt #InstallationArt #OutlookInterview #ClimateAction
Most of his works revolve around decentering human beings from the understanding of ecology and discussing the superior position we as a species have placed ourselves in. His works have been featured in the Kochi, Sharjah, and Havana Biennials.
Reporter: Rani Jana
Camera: Vikram Sharma
Follow us:
Website: https://www.outlookindia.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Outlookindia
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outlookindia/
X: https://twitter.com/Outlookindia
Whatsapp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaNrF3v0AgWLA6OnJH0R
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OutlookMagazine
Dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/outlookindia
#ClimateInjustice #RaviAgarwal #ArtAndActivism #Rhizome2015 #NatureAndFuture #EnvironmentalArt #ClimateChange #SustainableArt #ArtForChange #Photography #VideoArt #InstallationArt #OutlookInterview #ClimateAction
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Rani Jana from Outlook India.
00:02Right now I'm sitting with Ravi Agarwal ji,
00:05who has featured on
00:07the latest issue for Outlook, Climate Injustice.
00:11Ravi Agarwal ji is an interdisciplinary practitioner.
00:16So he's a writer, he's a curator,
00:18he's a photographer,
00:20and a lot of his work has been
00:22displayed globally and domestically.
00:25He's currently working on the dolphins
00:29of Ganga and Indus.
00:31And we'll have a quick chat about the cover and more.
00:35I wanted to firstly ask about this picture,
00:39because if you see this picture,
00:41it's very Instagrammy, right?
00:44Like very picturesque,
00:45like something I would see during a vacation,
00:48like the sea is blue and then there's this
00:51like golden yellow sun
00:53and the sand looks like really aesthetic
00:56with like seashells.
00:57And then in the middle of it,
00:59we have like placards.
01:00And the placards,
01:02like some of the words in the placards
01:04are very different from,
01:06you know, what the sea and the sand is showing.
01:10Like there is MLA,
01:12there is a fiberglass,
01:15there is next village,
01:16there's motorcycle.
01:18I wanted to know a little bit about the idea
01:20behind this picture, right?
01:23Like how did you come about
01:26planning this crafted picture?
01:29So this particular picture called Rizom,
01:32it's an outcome of many years of engagement
01:36with the fishers of the coast of Tamil Nadu
01:38with one particular village there.
01:40And my question in that engagement
01:43was out of curiosity of what is the,
01:46how does the life of the fishers change
01:50in these times of climate change?
01:53And what I saw was there were many things happening
01:56at the same time.
01:57The sea was rising,
01:58there was more tourism on the beach,
02:00the sand, the landing beaches,
02:02which is essential for the fishing boats
02:05was shifting because the sand was shifting.
02:07There were new groins,
02:09all kinds of, it was not,
02:11climate change didn't come on its own.
02:13It came with so many other things.
02:15And many of these fishers have been there
02:17fishing for 2000 years
02:19because the boats they used were also very, very old,
02:21like the wooden boat which they used,
02:23which has now slowly become fiberglass.
02:26And they don't want the children to be fishers anymore
02:28because they feel,
02:29so it's like an end of a whole life
02:32of a certain kind of engagement with the landscape.
02:35And so this picture came about
02:37one of the last works I did in that time.
02:42And this was like an installation on the beach.
02:45These words are something which I encountered
02:48in a constant question I was asking them,
02:50what does the sea mean to you?
02:52Because to most of the sea means
02:54in a certain kind of aesthetic quality.
02:56It's beautiful, it's stormy,
02:58it is something mysterious.
03:00But with their relationship with the sea
03:02was nothing of that abstractness.
03:05Very material, very immediate, very here and now.
03:09So these words were the words
03:12that I wrote in my diary of their responses.
03:15And these became the words
03:16in which I'm counterposing the question
03:19of a lived nature to an abstract nature.
03:22And you pointed out that it's a beautiful,
03:25yes, the sea is beautiful.
03:26That's how we would like to see it.
03:28But that's not how they see it.
03:30And I'm very interested in how we relate
03:33what how the idea of nature comes about,
03:35how it becomes abstracted into an aesthetic
03:38to the lived idea of an engagement
03:40where nature is not mentioned as a separate word,
03:44but it's part of an everyday life.
03:46And this abstraction also leads,
03:49I think, to extraction of nature
03:52and its subsequent climate change issue.
03:55It leads to what we now is climate change
03:57because climate change is an outcome
03:59of its extraction of nature.
04:00Yeah.
04:01So I wanted to ask about the medium of this photograph.
04:05So how did you, like, what was the medium and mode
04:09and how did you click this picture?
04:10And yeah, so like we have so many cameras in front of us.
04:15So like, can you tell us a little bit about them?
04:17So my prime medium is the photograph
04:20and I started photographing when I was 12 years old.
04:23So these cameras, some of them are 40, 45 years old.
04:26I've done a lot of work with these cameras.
04:28I still use them.
04:29I use now also digital cameras.
04:31But you see the thing about having any medium,
04:36whether it's photography, paintings,
04:37culture or performance,
04:38anything you might want to call,
04:40is to know the medium and then to work with it.
04:44And then once you know it, you experiment with it.
04:47So every medium takes a lot of time to get to know
04:50because you have to know yourself through the medium.
04:53The medium is not away from you.
04:55Yeah.
04:56But how you know the medium is also how the medium
04:58teaches you about yourself and your own eye.
05:01So I think it's a complex relationship,
05:03but I believe that you have to stay with it
05:07to be the best at what you can do.
05:10So the photograph, the camera, the photograph,
05:14the lens has been my prime medium.
05:17I now experiment with it in many ways.
05:19This is a photograph of an installation,
05:21but it is not a documentary photograph.
05:25But a lot of the work is also a documentary photograph,
05:28also installations which have conceived like Lunar Tide
05:32and other works in that work.
05:34But I think that in a sense,
05:36any medium has to serve both what you want to say,
05:40because I work with ideas,
05:43but also you must be able to use the medium
05:48for the purpose you want to use it for.
05:50And that takes time.
05:51Yeah.
05:52When the medium becomes part of you.
05:54Yeah.
05:55So now I think of the photograph
06:01automatically in a sense.
06:03The oppression that is towards nature
06:05is quite abstract, right?
06:07Because people think it's different
06:10from human beings being oppressed.
06:12In the sense, oppression towards human beings,
06:15you can see directly, right?
06:17Like you can see people fighting,
06:18you can see people's emotions.
06:20It is tangible.
06:22But the oppression that is towards environment,
06:25like we are only seeing aftermath,
06:27like almost like years later, right?
06:30So how did you get interested in environmental injustice?
06:37Well, how I got interested was
06:39because I used to do birdwatching when I was a child.
06:42Okay.
06:43I used to walk the forest
06:44and if somebody hurt a tree, it used to really hurt me.
06:46And my first campaign was about the Delhi Ridge Forest,
06:49you know, in 1993, 94.
06:52And because it really used to pain me
06:53if somebody used to cut, it still does.
06:55I get angry about it.
06:57So it's something which I don't know why I feel angry
07:00that if you heard something like that,
07:01then I want to stop it in a sense.
07:03And that made the activist out of me.
07:06But in a sense that why we don't see these things
07:10is because of our histories of oppression.
07:15We don't see it because we've taught ourselves not to see.
07:18Because it's not like people who have that,
07:21there's violence on the ground,
07:23which has not existed for the last hundreds of years.
07:26It's just that we've chosen not to see it
07:28because the dominant narratives have taken over
07:31that we have learned not to see.
07:34And I think when you start seeing, learning to see,
07:37you see that very clearly in a sense.
07:40And look at the violence,
07:43look at how we've become so strongly human.
07:46We believe that we are the most intelligent species
07:49on the planet.
07:50Yeah.
07:51But we haven't been there long enough.
07:52The dinosaurs there was there longer.
07:54Yeah.
07:54The dinosaurs was there for almost 65 million years.
07:57We've been hardly there for 100,000 years
08:00or less in a sense.
08:01So what is the claim to this planet, which we have?
08:04And if you look at us genetically,
08:07our genes are co-mingled with so many other genetic stock
08:12from so many other bacteria and animals and all that.
08:15So the claim to exclusion is also not true.
08:18So these are wrong claims we've made
08:20about how we've imagined ourselves as separate.
08:22But even some new science tells you
08:25that we are not that separate.
08:28We are part of the same kind of gene pool in a sense.
08:32And our evolution is not guaranteed
08:34and that our futures are not guaranteed in a sense.
08:37So of course, now when we have a crisis of climate change,
08:41then what I call the condition,
08:44because the condition existed long
08:46before the crisis appeared,
08:48the crisis of condition has made us to a point
08:51where we are saying, okay, now in the sixth extinction,
08:54now with the climate change,
08:56now what are we gonna do?
08:58And again, my question is,
09:01can we do something without learning
09:05from what needs to be done?
09:06And we can only learn from people
09:09who have lived in the landscapes.
09:12The fishers can tell you more about the futures,
09:15how to be less destructive, how to live with nature
09:19than let's say a machine can tell you,
09:23the technology can tell you.
09:25So, I believe that we have a lot of answers
09:28which are there in these lives,
09:32in these relationships, which are existing,
09:37which have not completely disappeared
09:40and we need to learn from them.
09:41And I think a future will depend on our learning.
09:44And that's why I keep going back.
09:46I went to the fishers to learn from them
09:48and I learned a lot.
09:49I learned how to listen for first reason.
09:52I learned how they are humble to the sea.
09:55So, you're there and clear sky, clear day.
09:58And I say, why aren't you fishing today?
10:01They said, no, the sea is not right.
10:03We will not fish today.
10:04It's something happening.
10:06So, how do they know that?
10:07It's not visible.
10:08The Met channel is not saying that,
10:10the weather channel is,
10:11but they know something about it.
10:13So, what is it they know?
10:14They know from a different way than I know something.
10:18So, I think these are things we need to learn.
10:21And I always feel we don't need to tell fishers
10:24about climate change.
10:26We need to make them partners in knowledge production.
10:30That's why in the interdisciplinary,
10:32it's not about only looking at science and art,
10:36but also looking at those knowledges
10:39which we have decided are not knowledge systems.
10:42But actually they know a lot
10:44about how to live on this planet.
10:46So, I'm really interested in relearning in a sense.
10:51So, you brought up the point about,
10:53you know, they respect the sea, right?
10:56And we have on the table,
10:59some new works that you are working on.
11:01And it is about cacao extraction.
11:04And they're very interesting material
11:09because you have like,
11:11they're already like pre-made pictures.
11:13They have been existing
11:14and you kind of inserted yourself in these pictures.
11:19The manner in which you have put yourself in the frame
11:23is very devotional, right?
11:25Could you like talk us a little through about?
11:28This is a project I'm invited to.
11:30It's currently showing in Vietnam.
11:32It's called the Asia Cacao Project.
11:34So, and I was looking at the histories of cacao,
11:38but also its current manifestation in India
11:40because a lot of new revival of boutique chocolate
11:44and as something which is very tasty and all that.
11:47But I was looking at the history of cacao
11:49and cacao was a thing of reverence,
11:51of prayer in the Mayan and the Aztecs.
11:54And 2000 years back,
11:56you know, almost 5,000 years back
11:57till the Spanish brought it to Europe.
12:01And it became from that plant of reverence
12:07to a plant of sensuality and commodity
12:10because you put added milk to it.
12:12You made it sweet.
12:13You made it chocolate
12:14and all the big brands started selling
12:16with these fancy advertisements of women
12:19of virility and all that.
12:21So how this plant became a plant of reverence
12:24to a plant of sensuality is what I was really interested in.
12:28I think this is the history
12:29of extraction and commodification.
12:32And I think I was thinking about how do we say,
12:37apologize to that plant and saying,
12:40we are sorry for what we did to you
12:42because you came from another system
12:46and we made you something else.
12:49And we don't even know what other plants
12:51you lived with in a sense,
12:52that whole ecology is lost.
12:54So I took images, I've made photo collages
13:00and I've done collages of advertisements,
13:03but the essential insertion is of me
13:06and I come from India and as a Hindu,
13:09I also do Aarti.
13:11So Aarti to me is a devotional space.
13:13It's also a place where we say,
13:16we say, do a devotion,
13:19but also of reverence and of apology
13:22that we do all these wrongs and we are with you now.
13:26So to me, these gestures are replicating
13:30a performative Aarti,
13:31which have been photographed and inserted.
13:33I don't mention that in the work
13:35because it's a personal thing.
13:37But I was hoping that the way I'm showing
13:42will show some reverence to the works.
13:45So it is really getting the histories of cacao,
13:48of nature, of plants and saying,
13:52we are sorry for what we did to you
13:53and now we need to move forward with that.
13:56I know that you're also working on the dolphins
14:00of Indus and Ganga and that is very interesting.
14:05Can you like tell us a little bit about it
14:07because you also mentioned
14:09how they are separated by dams, right?
14:11And although they have the same route,
14:14they don't, like, you know,
14:16maybe they have never met, you know.
14:18So how did you come up with that?
14:20And yeah.
14:21It's a very interesting species, you know,
14:25because this work I'm doing with the Lahore Biennial
14:28I'm invited to,
14:30and it's a very interesting relationship,
14:33which is in deep time.
14:36So it is when 50 million years ago,
14:39the Indian subcontinent moved from
14:43the African subcontinent,
14:46hits the Eurasian plate from the Tethys Sea,
14:49you know, which isolates itself.
14:50And the whale gets separated from the main whale
14:55and becomes evolved into these dolphins,
14:58three dolphins, the Irrawaddy dolphin,
15:00the Gangetic dolphin and the Indus dolphin.
15:03The Irrawaddy dolphin is now extinct.
15:05These two dolphins still remain the highly critical,
15:09the site is the critical list.
15:12But until 19, 2021,
15:15we were not sure they are one species,
15:17sub-species or two.
15:18We found the two separate species,
15:20but they're the common root,
15:21common ancestor in a sense.
15:23And they're both to the whales in a sense.
15:26And they both use echolocation.
15:27I was very interested.
15:29Now there are only two or three Indus dolphins,
15:33which are in India, in Harike Lake.
15:35And there are no Gangetic dolphins in the Indus,
15:39which is in Pakistan.
15:41So there are about 1800 of them in Pakistan,
15:43about 3000 of them in India and Bangladesh.
15:47But the thing is that the earlier
15:51they could move across ecosystems,
15:53now because there's so many dams
15:55across this border of nation states
15:58that they can't move across.
16:00So they have been isolated completely,
16:02but they are brethren of a kind and they precede us.
16:06The nation state is 70 years old, right?
16:10These dolphins are 50 million years old.
16:14So I'm just saying that we human beings
16:16are so new on the planet.
16:19These species are historic and ancient
16:22and we have destroyed them,
16:24but there's still, we have to learn from them.
16:27So the question always comes in,
16:29how does a dolphin see this in a question?
16:32And we are unable to answer the question
16:34because we cannot enter somebody else as a sentence.
16:37So I'm sort of, I'm thinking of the word work
16:40as echoes across borders.
16:43It is not the classical work about borders,
16:47but it's about talking about the more than human,
16:50which have been separated by manmade borders in a sense.
16:54And I really think there could be a time in the future
16:56where we may not survive the planet.
16:58If the temperature goes to five degrees more
17:01in the next coming years,
17:03the human being cannot adapt,
17:04at least the current human being cannot adapt.
17:07But these species will remain, you see.
17:09A lot of species have also gone extinct
17:13or are going extinct.
17:15Like you did a work,
17:17like one of your works was called Extinct
17:19and it was on vultures in Delhi and nearby areas
17:24where you started realizing that vultures
17:27are almost about to go extinct.
17:29So how did you come about with that project
17:33and like, how did you realize first that,
17:35okay, this is happening?
17:36Like, yeah.
17:37So, you know, I've been,
17:38I was a bird watcher,
17:39so I used to photograph birds, you know.
17:41So I've photographed scores of vultures in Delhi
17:44in the eighties, you know.
17:46They were everywhere.
17:47They're all the rage.
17:47You could see nesting vultures.
17:49You could, if you go out in this afternoon,
17:51you'll see them circling in the sky.
17:52Yes.
17:53Now they don't exist
17:54because in the last 25 years,
17:58a South Asian vulture has gone across all three species
18:01from 10 million to almost a 95% extinction.
18:07And what they found out after years of research
18:10was because of one pill,
18:11one painkiller, which was given to animals.
18:15And when the animals,
18:17it had stayed in the body when the animals died
18:20and the vultures ate the carcass,
18:23it destroyed the kidney.
18:25So, you know, in Toxic Sling,
18:27we do a lot of work in chemicals.
18:28I'm interested in how chemicals affect human health.
18:32So everything came together.
18:33It's, to me, the question was,
18:35how does a species,
18:36which is mentioned in the Ramayana,
18:39you know, the Garuda is the vulture, right?
18:42And in Cleopatra's crown, you see the vulture.
18:45How does a species like that,
18:47which has survived all this time,
18:49in 20 years becomes almost close to extinction
18:53because of one chemical which is introduced
18:56because we don't test enough for chemical effects.
19:00To me, it's a classic story
19:01of what you call the human-centric approach.
19:05And so, to me, it's really painful
19:07because, you know, there's a very well-known scholar
19:11in Australia who's written on the vultures,
19:15anthropologist, and he writes about
19:17how when you remove the vulture,
19:18and I've seen that in my own eyes
19:20when I visited many villages in Rajasthan,
19:24remove the vulture from the ecosystem when it disappears,
19:26there's so many networks of relationships
19:28which the villagers have to the vulture
19:30start breaking down.
19:32So it is, you know, it's a very fascinating bird
19:37because it is like the,
19:41which keeps everything clean,
19:43but it feeds on the dead,
19:45but it's completely clean itself.
19:46You know, it's not a dirty bird at all,
19:49but it scavenges, it's nature's scavenger.
19:53But also, it has, it's one of the species nests in villagers
19:58and the relationship, whole ecosystems
20:01around the vulture in that space.
20:03So when we remove a species,
20:06the question was, what does extinction mean?
20:09When you remove something,
20:11when something goes away,
20:12then how do we know it?
20:14How does the absence of it appear?
20:16It's like when you lose somebody from your family,
20:19one is the immediate loss,
20:20the absence is present in the deeper loss
20:24of everything with the person meant to you in your life.
20:27Right?
20:28Yeah.
20:29Similarly, when we make,
20:31and we are making so many animals and beings extinct,
20:35we don't, the bigger ones we can see,
20:37the smaller ones we don't see.
20:39There's a whole question of honeybees now,
20:41what's happening, honeybees and pesticides and pollination.
20:45But there's so many others which are smaller and unseeable,
20:49which are constantly being extinct.
20:51Of course, extinction is part of nature's evolution.
20:53It happens.
20:54But these are not nature's extinctions.
20:57Nature's extinctions happen because people,
21:00the animals and the beings evolve differently.
21:03But here, this is violent extinction.
21:06And when you violently extinct,
21:08there is no place for new world makings.
21:11So I think this is what you just said,
21:14the completely, we're living in the Anthropos,
21:18the Anthropocene,
21:20where we need to de-center ourselves in our minds
21:24and be more humble about it.
21:26Thank you so much, Raviji, for speaking to us.
21:28We have spoken about his body of work,
21:31past and present, and what is coming up.
21:33We also discussed wildlife, marginalization, colonialism,
21:38and most importantly, how the need to de-center human beings
21:44from the discourse of ecology and environment
21:48to properly understand what is climate injustice
21:52and how we can adapt new ways.
21:54Especially, we go back to looking at
21:57how indigenous people lived,
21:58how fishermen have this kind of respect.