The exploration of landscape in this project begins with the joining of components together, to make the extraordinary third: the splice. The Western Ghats are a vast field of activity and interdependence. The trajectories of practices extend across the landscape and are set in times, routines and cycles. The moments of these practices, of different time scales arearranged into an imagery to construct landscape as a field of traces left by practices inground. The gradient of traces narrates the character of their varying temporality. From geological traces of continents being pulled apart, to traces of plough marks in a paddy field, The Western Ghats is a field of traces left by practices that dwell in multiple grounds. Every relation of practice and ground makes a new trace. The ground holds multiplicity and allows
many traces to be imprinted. Yet the quality of some practices leave no trace, and other traces become permanent. Elements demarcated as ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’ join across the ground, through practices, never independent of each other. This imagery calls out how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are found in each other, in every ground and every practice. Practices maybe largely transformative that leave permanent traces in the ground but also ephemeral practices that leave temporary traces. Traces spread in the Ghats reveal the materiality of grounds and their ability to retain, imprint and resist changes in its texture. While policy has its own language of demarcating and creating boundaries, this project is a re-imagination of landscape through a constructed lens, to see it newly and find different things. All around in the landscape there is a co-existence of practices. Living practices of harvesting, building, walking, worshipping make the land dynamic by their own unique traces. Traces change, evolve, remain or disappear only for more marks to be imprinted in the ground of practices. This project re-imagines the Ghats as a 'Field of Traces' imprinted by the variety of practices and activities on the ground.
The 'trace' emerges as the splice of the ground-practice interaction that constructs landscape.
Using the operation of pulling apart (like velcro) to construct a transect of the Western Ghats demonstrating the pulling apart of continents that formed the Great Escarpment.
Operations of taking apart many matrials culminating into a plot that shows acts of pulling apart and qualities of resistance and retention in various materials.
Please go through the book below, it does more the most justice to this project. A lot of the images in this project have emerged from a very specific methodology.
A series of 'places' (centre row) that are constructed by 'practices' (last row) on a 'ground' (first row)
^Practices coming together
^Grounds coming together as a field of traces emerges.
