Writing Initiatives

In a time of intensifying ecological collapse—when forests are felled in the name of urban development and the rhetoric of “progress” is weaponised to erode habitats—can art embody resistance? Can art not only mourn loss but also actively halt it?

Wait for Weight, a site-responsive performance by the emerging interdisciplinary action group; Possible Futures, rooted in gesture, endurance, and sonic invocation, has emerged as a tender political intervention—a shared act of grief, resistance, and refusal. This essay frames it within broader dialogues in performance studies, eco-activism, and South Asian resistance histories.

The performance unfolded amid a student-led movement at the University of Hyderabad that successfully halted the auction and deforestation of nearly 400 acres of ecologically significant forest land (see Figure 1). The protests—anchored in solidarity, care, and collective refusal—had already disrupted the narrative of inevitability around ‘development’. Possible Futures chose this moment to create a work that echoed and deepened the call to action. The slogan of the protests—’Hum jungle bachane nikle hain… Aao hamare saath chalo’ (We have come out to save the forest… Come, walk with us)—was not merely a chant, but a living invocation woven into the performance itself.

Every grain remembers, each wave forgets…

The sea lives, they say, in rhythms you can almost feel under your skin – a pulse in the breeze, a pattern in the clouds, the subtle pull of tides whispering against your ankles. 

For centuries, the Pattinavars1 have tuned their bodies and nets to that pulse: reading the direction of the Vanni and Kota winds2, noting the color of the water. They’ve drawn Kolams3 on thresholds in rice flour to beckon crabs, prawns, and tiny shorebirds. These gestures have been their padu4: a spoken, unspoken code of rotational fishing rights enforced by Oor (village) panchayats with the weight of caste, custom, and collective care.


Recently, I walked the Coromandel Coast at dawn and watched women trace kolam in rice flour across cracked concrete. Minutes later, a fishing trawler’s wake washed it away.

I wondered – can we ever TL;DR this grief, this solastalgia? 


Trawlers roar in, engines thrumming through Ennore’s mangrove roots. Steel mills dump slurry into once-clear creeks.

What happens when the very air you lean into to predict tomorrow’s catch becomes synthetic? When the young men who used to lash the catamaran to deep-sea currents trade that timber boat for a day’s wage at the steel plant?  

The nets come up empty; the kolam dries to chalky silhouettes. 

How do you compress the memory of a disappearing ritual, of lore, of a fish shoal that learned to avoid our nets? 

Today, those embodied knowledges lie wounded on the beach like half-buried wrecks. The sea’s pulse is practiced only in memory. 


We live in a world that wants coastal wisdom in a tweet and climate collapse in an infographic. And in doing so, we’ve engineered away the very thing that makes us human: the messy, beautiful labor of sitting with loss and longing, of letting the sea and its communities change us from the inside out.


I tried to trace the fractures – not only in the coastline, but in the caste-bound padu, in the ritual economy of welcome, in the porous lines between human and more-than-human life. 

I ask: how does art emerge when the sea itself is receding?

How do these dwindling rituals become both archive and act?

Earlier this year, amidst some exceptional practices on view in a group exhibition at the SOAS Gallery in London,¹ I came across a familiar artwork — or a close version of it — that I remembered seeing a long time ago in Delhi. Seemingly an aerial view of an open-pit mining site, each iteration was uniquely reproduced in a grid of about 30 copper plates, mottled with pools of striking blue-green patina filtering out from seams across its metallic surface. Like before, I found myself deeply intrigued by the materiality of the work – not to mention the peculiar rendering of the landscape.

Many years ago, walking in a forest in Honnemaradu, with the light fading from the path, a friend told me to pause before scrambling for my torchlight. Slowly, we lost sight of our feet. The slippery edges of the trail retreated into complete darkness. The outlines of the trees, the rocks, and our bodies disappeared altogether.

And then — shapes began forming. A faint scribble of thorns near my ankles. Silk-seeds from the honne trees, strewn like coins, materialised before us. It was an image of the forest, developing itself in the dark. 

Some photographers carry a memory like this too — a moment when a route they walk every day, camera in hand, finally reveals itself to them. It is a moment they wait for, tweak their process and materials for, walk the same path again and again for. It is not so romantic as a communion, nor as aggressive as a capture. While practices of making photographs of or about the environment are popularly described under the broad banners of ‘ecological’ or ‘eco-political’ art, practitioners’ intentions and experiences are also often driven by the desire to find and maintain a more meaningful, personal relationship with their surroundings.  

Year on year, the climate crisis grows more pressing, with news headlines about population displacement, frequent natural disasters and species extinction  now fixtures of everyday life. Commentators have noted that while scientists, activists and indigenous communities have led movements against the continued deterioration of natural habitats and the commons, political will to address this remains tepid. 

The climate emergency demands frameworks that exceed disciplinary silos, and contemporary art’s increasing engagement with ecology reflects this epistemic shift. Recent surveys of climate-oriented art practices have outlined how artists have responded to the planetary scale of the crisis with both localised inquiry and global critique. In contrast to early environmental art, which often romanticised nature or positioned it as a passive site of intervention, recent ecological art sees nature as a politicised and contested terrain. A growing number of artists are dissolving the boundaries between environmentalist and artistic movements, situating their practices within the infrastructure of activism itself. This essay will review recent experiments by artists and organisations to embed art in direct activism, invite the wider public to bear witness to climate catastrophe, and engage in frank discourse on the responsibilities of the artist in an age of collapse. The aim is to explore how art operates not only as a medium of ecological expression, but as a site of material engagement, networked resistance, and the co-creation of alternative environmental futures.

Artists not only comment on social realities but are themselves entangled in the material conditions of global circulation, funding networks, and civic fragmentation. Scholars like Karin Zitzewitz have noted that art institutions — whether commercial or non-profit — often make it a point to carefully gerrymander any practical activism out of the projects they support, framing them instead as matters of logistics, mobility and legibility for diverse audiences. The goal of the NGO is often to make politically engaged, context-specific art easily digestible  and globally presentable, rather than deploying it to actively solve the issues it raises. As a result of this not-so-porous border between the black box (or white cube) of the art world, and the noisy, chaotic ‘real world’, meaningful projects often reach only those audiences already supported by the same institutions. Over time, the vocabulary of artistic interventions in the public sphere has become increasingly oriented around institutional appeal rather than relevance to affected communities. Consequently, artists and curators may feel ill-equipped to engage with their subject directly, instead seeking institutional shelter from the consequences of taking anti-authoritarian or anti-corporate stances.