When Elizabeth Yorke went to Joida town in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka last summer, she discovered a community whose culture and culinary habits were closely linked to a plant that grows underground. The Kunbi community’s affinity to maadi, a tuber as flaky as a fish, opened the eyes of Yorke, a food innovator by training. A year later, maadi is part of 25 varieties of tubers that her Edible Issues, an organisation that conducts research on the future of food, has brought together in an exhibition.

Part of the eighth edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, which concluded on December 23, the Roots to Resilience exhibition by Edible Issues tells the story of a much-maligned crop that could define the future of food security in a climate disaster-ridden world. Tubers are also determining a curious element of resilience both communities and crops would be sharing in an act of survival.

“Tuber has high nutrient value. It is also a highly resilient food,” say Yorke and Anusha Murthy, who co-founded the Bengaluru-based Edible Issues, a food systems collective, after studying food innovation in Italy five years ago. A Serendipity Arts Foundation project, Roots to Resilience contains different varieties of tubers from Karnataka, Kerala and Goa, along with paintings, videos and research findings on the crop. “Tuber requires considerably less amount of water compared to paddy and wheat,” says Murthy. “From a community, climate change and culinary perspective, tuber adds diversity to our diet.”

This year’s Serendipity Arts Festival trains its lens on sustainability with art practices, grassroots research and geo-perspectives merging in a complex quest for a planet for all.

“Several artforms are disappearing. It is necessary to sustain and contemporarise them for the sake of communities and cultures,” says Shalinee Ghosh, co-founder of FroggMag, a design initiative for traditional communities and their crafts. This year, FroggMag helped the Santhal community in Birbhum district of West Bengal create a reed-seed-bead earring to take tribal craft to the mainstream. “The Santhal community is so conscious of the environment that they would collect seeds from the forest only when the forest doesn’t need them,” says Ghosh. “It is necessary to take sustainability beyond materials and look at the balance needed between culture, community, conservation and commerce,” she adds.

Time as mother

A centrepiece of the festival’s exploration of communities and cultures is Time as a Mother, an exhibition of works by some of the top artists in the world. Curated by Ravi Agarwal, the celebrated visual artist, filmmaker and environmental campaigner, and Swiss author Damian Christinger, known for his writings on indigenous knowledge, the show at the newly-restored Old PWD Complex close to the Mandovi river, examines the human being’s temporal relationships towards nature and built environments. Award-winning artist Dharmendra Prasad, one of the first Indian artists to respond to the farmers’ protests in 2020, visual artist Paribartana Mohanty, Swiss artist Ursula Biemann and Navjot Altaf, whose art practices have focused for long on India’s tribal craft, are among the eight artists part of Time as a Mother, which offers multiple perspectives of sustainability and the planet through film, poetry, sound, text and narratives.

“In the ecological question and climate change, time plays an important role,” explains Agarwal, who broached the subject of exploring artistic positions from different continents on inequalities and social justice with Christinger one-and-half years ago. “Social and environmental justice are interconnected. It is not an equal planet for all. The Dalits will see nature and sustainability differently,” adds Agarwal. “Time heals all wounds,} they say. The long, violent histories of our extraction economies, the accelerating destruction of habitats, and the ticking clock of extreme weather events might just prove this saying wrong,” say Agarwal and Christinger. Mohanty’s new work explores new environment disaster landscapes emerging near coastal areas on the Bay of Bengal in Odisha, Biemann investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water through her research spanning Greenland to Amazonian rainforest, Prasad’s two-channel video installation, Aadara, documents time and ecology through agrarian urgencies in Nadaon village of Bihar devastated by deforestation and water contamination. Soul Breathing Wind, Altaf’s 62-minute video installation focuses on the politics, development agenda and human-made environmental change in Chhattisgarh.

Forces of nature

Across exhibitions and workshops, artists, activists, performers, chefs and farmers have dealt with vital questions on sustainability in an array of activities, including a podcast about climate change and humour, the art of bamboo craft, a design initiative by Nagaland’s indigenous communities in weaving threads with sustainable materials and even an evocation of ancient artforms to invoke elements of nature. “There’s an array of forces that affect how we eat—agriculture, human labour, environmental sustainability, politics, trade, ethics, policy, culture, business. By bringing people from these different principles together we aim to create a platform to facilitate this exchange of information to understand what our food futures might look like,” says Murthy of Edible Issues.

Another highlight of the festival is artist Niroj Satpathy’s works. Satpathy, an alumnus of the Utkal University of Culture in Odisha who once worked as a night supervisor with Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s solid waste management department, creates superhero-like characters to present a portrait of the national capital from the point of view of a landfill’s toxicity and reality.

Faizal Khan is a freelancer