From north to south, Raqs Media Collective traces water as memory

Monica Narula: We are creating artworks for weather stations at two locations on a north–south axis: Nigeria and Rajasthan. With the New Delhi-based arts organization Khoj, we have been looking at water in the context of the 28th parallel north – the circle of latitude 28 degrees north of the equator that takes in Africa, Asia, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and North America. In Rajasthan, we are using two stepwells as vantage points. Firstly, the Chand Baori stepwell, which is one of the oldest of its kind in Rajasthan and one of the largest in the world. It has thousands of steps, but now very little water is left. It’s a site for tourism and you cannot descend into it. We’re also looking at a far more modest stepwell, in the village of Budha Pushkar in Rajasthan, which is a remnant of an everyday tradition. We’ve been filming there with a drone, exploring its geometry, which has a formal relationship to sacred geometries.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta: Besides providing water, a stepwell is also a device for remembering what the water level was during different monsoons. It gives you an indication of a history of living with water and that’s an important thing, especially when groundwater levels fluctuate significantly, as they now do increasingly. It’s about engaging the relationship between climate change and water as a lived memory.

MN: It’s also about how that memory trickles into the everyday and is part of the general weave of things, how we talk about water or the smell of the rain. At another point on the 28th parallel, we’ve been filming the Teesta River, which is always in spate and very lively: it feels like it could overflow and burst its banks at any time.

SS: The Teesta is one of a number of rivers in the South Asian region that cross national borders and are subject to political dispute with geopolitical echoes. Bangladesh complains about how India controls the Teesta’s flow. With water becoming an increasingly scarce resource, the future of this region depends on how sensibly people will share water rather than how they use it as a pawn in a geopolitical game.

MN: We are filming in multiple locations and we see these as fragments of film that can be used in a multimedia collage with sound, text, and video. This is a work that can assume varied forms depending on which platform we are going to show it on – whether the website or in a physical exhibition. Making this work is not a linear process: it branches off in multiple directions, more like crochet than knitting, as you can go back and forwards and extend in more than one direction.

SS: In Nigeria, meanwhile, we’re exploring the surface of the soil at both Ecology Green Farm – an artists’ residency and organic farm created by Yinka Shonibare and operated by his Guest Artist Space Foundation in the village of Ikise, Ogun State – as well as within the Oshun-Osogbo forest, a sacred grove a few hours’ drive from the farm.

One tends to think of soil as flat, but it has depth and time written into it. Forests have their own undergrowth environment, in which the compost from fallen leaves regenerates the soil’s fertility. When that same tract of land is turned over to commercial farming, there is a flattening-out of the soil. We want to explore this relationship between the farm and the different modes of life that sustain a virgin forest which has never been touched because of its sacred nature. What is it that makes it possible for human beings to say: we will take this specific part of space and time and give it a status that prevents us from harming it? That’s an interesting dynamic: what is it to cultivate and what it is to conserve. Both have consequences.

Part of a series of stories on the World Weather Network, a constellation of 28 artist-created weather stations around the world, initiated by Artangel in London in response to climate change.

Raqs Media Collective is Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. It is represented by Project 88 (Mumbai) and Frith Street Gallery (London).

Skye Sherwin is an art writer based in Rochester, UK. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and numerous art publications.

Published on March 29, 2023.

Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Chand Baori stepwell. Photo by Gerd Eichmann. A dark filter was applied over the image for readability. 2. Raqs Media Collective, Provisions for Everybody (video still), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.