By Jamie Allen
As a researcher working at the intersections of ecological thought, media art, and agriculture, I have long been inspired by the rich intellectual and practical engagements found in the Indian context. India’s vast agricultural resources and diverse crop production play a pivotal role in global food security. As the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses, and spices, and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, fruits, and vegetables, India status as a food-surplus country actively contributes global food and nutritional security, as well as precipitating a host of urban-countryside experiments and creative reconsitutions of the agricultural/ecological relation. The Knowledge2Action mobility grant enabled the gathering of communities of concern for Agri-Cultures & Elemental Exchanges (ACEE), rooted in questions of food systems, multispecies entanglements, and shared cultures of knowledge and care. The community that emerged in preparation for an onsite event with Science Gallery Bengaluru thrives, preparing and tending the ground for something fertile and enduring.
The project unfolds between Bengaluru and Ahmedabad, hosted in part by Science Gallery Bengaluru and Anant National University (with an additional potential emerging collaboration with Jenia Mukterjee, looking at the blue flower futures as a proposition for resilient metabolisms and a delta commons in the Sundarbans). We gather practitioners—farmers, artists, agricultural scientists, curators, and ecology activists—to share stories and practices of food, farming, and the nonhuman, through workshops, shared meals, and convivial conversations. We have curated a collaborative reader and deepened bonds with an astonishing range of contributors. From producers like Sarjapura Curries, Hoopinkai Farms, Forgotten Greens, and Spudnik Farms, to independent researchers, artists, and educators including Lily Kelting, Biplab Mahato, Sunayana Ganguly, Sonali Sathaye, Supratim Bhattacharya, and Nomita Khatri, a plural, decentralised conversation is emerging. Cross-disciplinary, translocal, and intergenerational connections are built through correspondence, through ideas and media exchanged in online threads and chats, and through the patient attention that is so needed in grassroots ecological, critically-creative and artistic work.
I am grateful to the K2A program, Swissnex India, and our many collaborators for supporting this unfolding, which exemplifies a belief I have that research must also be a form of relationship building and desirous exchange between entities, both human and non, as well as places, practices, and possibilities. I look forward to visits to India in 2025, to cook together, walk together, and continue this collective cultivation of thought and action.
Knowledge2Action 
Leave a comment