Embodied Cartographies and Visual Entanglements in the Delta
Research project
with Jeanne Penjan Lassus
(2020-2022)
Embodied Cartographies and Visual Entanglements in the Delta explores what it means to map, represent and experience the shifting, disappearing landscape of the Indus delta in Pakistan. The project traces fisherfolk practices around the sensing body and the sacred to engage with the different cosmologies and temporalities of the delta that unsettle urban conceptions of land and colonial ways of seeing. We focus on histories and practices of remembrance, return and resistance that enable fisherfolk long displaced from the delta, to maintain a connection with their ancestral creeks. These aquatic imaginaries and sacred poetic registers, constitute embodied cartographies that centre alternate forms of knowing and relationality in a more-than-human world. We trace these situated knowledges and practices to develop sensorial methods that grapple with ecologies of wetness, environmental destruction and the politics of representation.
Supported by the Alserkal Arts Foundation Research Grant.
