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Energy and Growth – a budding tree and the sprout of a young grass

Magazine

17 April 2023
This month's topic: EnergyResident Editor: Àngels Miralda

Energy and Growth – a budding tree and the sprout of a young grass

10 November 2020

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In Kitchen –

Day by day, I am transforming from ecosystem to material, identified by the millions as a fuel of vernacular kitchen. I am processed through need to become cultural component. The state policy to make kitchen spaces comfortable is a blind action to reduce gesture production, intensity of toil and touch with materials. As a fuel I arrive at vernacular kitchen but before that I was fodder and prior to that I was a wild grass and a crop plant serving the need of hunger. I run the performance in architecture. I get produce between the friction of crop waste and animal waste. Traditional kitchen breathes because of me and human, and architecture breathes because of kitchen. A sculptural site and a architectural sub element due to necessity of millions generate taste and smell, and transfer it to the personal hunger of body and mind. Due to everyday need of hunger the kitchen spaces exists beyond architecture producing theatricality, toil, gestures of care (self/other).

 

15 December 2020

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Energies from the field –

  1. Gesture is a pencil to shape the land.
  2. Fields take shapes with friction between Human warmth and anger, anger as genealogical process and human warmth as a crop not in practice.
  3. Horizon walks forward and melt to moist the fields.
  4. A old pathway in between the fields is sculpted by the feets, carrying the weight of need and hunger.
  5. Mango trees as the vertical pillars of food beyond fields.

 

18 June 2022

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From the Hay fields of @thomas_buchli

1.
Machines widens the gap between human body and land.

2.
Grasses smells with intensity, in the last 20 years there is the shift in the characters and intensity of the smell of these grasses.

3.
Haying is pain, cutting grasses with machines results in the pain in the arms. Pleasure also come when the work gets done.

4.
How to avoid walking in the cutting process of the grass. Thomas is working to built a Hay cutting robot.

5.
When a farmer works under big companies then a farmer losses his freedom.

6.
Haying is about being alert to the future crisis, biodiversity and beauty of the landscape.

 

30 June, 2022

Biography of a brown grass

1.
I am not a grass,
I am a brown skin.
Misplaced and displaced due to your manipulation.
I travel from time of uncertainty to see possibility of care in desert.
I travel from plains of my veins to hills of sunlight.
I travel from valleys of care to the mountains of your superiority.
I wanted to liberate myself from my photosynthesis towards a fresh lake,
But ended in a psychic cage.

2.
Come and harvest my enthusiasm,
In you, Insert some care instead of courage.
Come with your superiority, i will mixed it with the my aroma and dryness.

3.
From the streets of my village to the narrow valleys of Alps, you harvest violence.
Dive under your blood, and cut all the crops of hate.
And contribute in creating a beautiful valley, a and a forest of care.

from
– Grass museum.

 

1 October 2022

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A narration about empathetic energy of a Bamboo House by a hungry elephant –

From – Garopara village, Assam.

Slowly I begun to feel the presence of human flesh and it’s gentle pressure blurred with the dry
mud walls.

The strong presence of care and craft in each part of bamboo house sparked a aesthetic hunger
within me.

The aroma of coconut trees,
made me to walk from forest to the villages.

I arrived under a coconut tree, my hunger gets more widened and deeper.
Suddenly, darkness revealed a house in front of me.

I sensed the presence of human warmth worried inside the house.
On the walls I saw the impressions of gestures.
Beneath the Gestures i saw wide open eyes.
I gazed into them deeper, wider and longer.

I saw,
Prayer erupting from eyes,
I saw, determination settling down in the eyes,
I saw, a deep forest of fear, and a vast field of desperation.

I saw the image of harvest festival in the hairs of a female cultivator, sleeping inside unknown to
my presence.

I saw, a woman farmer and her family, camouflaged in the uncertainty of their toil.

I become more hungry,
Not for the paddy grains, bananas, jackfruit and coconuts,
but for empathetic energy and care,

 

25 December, 2022

Dilemma of a cultivator –

My arms rests on my knees. My intelligence rests on my rawness. My body weight rests on my dreams. My gaze rests on my curiosity. My gestures rests on therapy. And i vomit my energies through a wooden plough on this temporal landscape.

I am a cultivator, waiting for the land to get soften. My eyes see the land extanded beyond my intelligence. My curiosity becomes tiny amidst the aroma of coriander. In front of soft leaves of raddish i find my personality turning rough and poor.

I walk gently on this black alluvial soil. Due to cracks in my being, i begun to feel the fragmented forms in soil. I pushed the wooden plough forward and kept my knowledge somewhere in between the discarded young mustard crop field.

My dual personality walks between the soil i cultivate and the sense of extraction. I till soil and myself too, to realise empathy. In front of my crops my being scattered all over the horizon. I feel broken in front of the root of a wild grass. In front of winds and moisture i feel thirsty and empty.

The heavyness of my wet knowledge spread throughout the sediments of black alluvial. With my walk the soil shivers. I walk like elephant, in spite of the weight of my greed the soil remain tolerant.

The sharpness of my mind surrender itself infront of a bird, like a waterfall surrendering to gravity.

My gestures bounce back to my bones touching the energies of black alluvial soil of Bor Sapori at Panikhaiti.

 

10 February, 2023

Performative energies of non living –

Every morning the nerve of my feet shivers like a young fire. Every night the immobile gestures of my body cling with each other.

In early morning my gestures fall from my body like a dense rainfall,
and evaporate towards the sky like a migratory bird from far.

I was walking inside the root of a tree, a long walk took me into complex branches, which where
floating in the form of a boat.

My journey on the boat of knowledge, took me to the blank pages of a threshing floor.

There I saw –
The breathing energies of a agrarian tool rolling on the rough skin of a farmer, passing between
his movements and resting between his fingers and crops.

Dharmendra Prasad is an artist based in Guwahati and Buxar, and a member of Anga Art Collective. Through the collective, Anga harnesses communal energies that are present in rural Indian society – they collaborate with villagers, academics, and activists to approach the geography and social fabric of Assam. Prasad’s individual practice involves photography, poetry, and collective workshops that seek to bring value to the abundant knowledge of farmers. Often experienced and with no formal studies, Prasad’s Harvest School aims to unlearn the colonial and hierarchical systems that assert superiority to the ancient wisdom of the farmer’s hands. The Harvest School brings together families, craftsmen, fishermen, and urban youths together with the non-human agencies that surround us.

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