FROM LAND TO LANDSCAPE, TOWARD ECOLOGY

Art has long mediated human relationships to land. From early cave drawings to Renaissance perspectives, nature has been ‘framed’, first as a backdrop to dominant narratives, then as a subject of conquest and categorisation.

The camera obscura exemplified this shift, enabling a ‘scaping’; not merely as representation, but as a process of making and shaping. Here, land becomes landscape through human engineering and technological mastery. In this sense, ‘scaping’ names a phenomenological bringing-forth (poiesis), where terrain is rendered as something to be formed, ordered, and possessed. Within this apparatus of control, lived, relational ecologies are transformed into discretised, extractable physiognomies.

These visual technologies paralleled the rise of the nation-state, collapsing diverse ecological and cultural expressions into singular, state-sanctioned narratives. Local, tribal, and indigenous relationships with the environment were subjugated, erased, and overwritten.

Environmental art emerged as a counterpoint to this trend, challenging anthropocentric framings and dualisms that separated humans from nature. It reclaimed impermanence, process, and decay, using natural materials like seeds, leaves, and algae to foreground ecological cycles. Feminist and ecofeminist artists elevated this resistance, linking extractive patriarchy with environmental degradation and offering community, care, and interdependence as practices of resistance.

Yet, the practice also remains embedded within representational and referential logics of ‘making visible’; that is, it remains rife with power-privilege and a stealing or usurping of ‘voice’. ‘Voice’ does not simply mean speech or expression, but the authority to narrate experience, to define meaning, and to determine how one’s lifeworld enters public discourse. When artists mediate ecological struggle without structural accountability, they risk translating lived realities into aesthetic forms that circulate elsewhere, while those communities remain unheard in the very systems that shape their futures. As artists worked with organic materials or fragile ecologies, these gestures were frequently mediated through galleries, archives, and curatorial frames that extracted local knowledge and re-presented it as aesthetic capital. Communities became sources of content rather than agents of authorship; their ecological lifeworlds were translated into images, data, or symbolic forms legible to institutional and global audiences. 

The shift that followed moved away from visibility toward accountability. Collaborative and community-led practices emerged that prioritised duration over display, process over product, and consent over capture. By the 1990s, environmental art had evolved further, foregrounding ethics, land-based knowledge, and climate justice. Rooted in community and Indigenous-led stewardship, it shifted from monumental interventions to modest, restorative acts. Here, the artwork became a social and ecological relation, co-produced through situated memory, rather than a representation of the ‘other’ for external consumption, reconfiguring the role of the artist from interpreter to participant within living social and ecological systems.

Today, artists, researchers, and communities resist ecological collapse through situated, collective practices. In India, folk and traditional artists have long worked with natural materials as practices rooted in land and cosmology, labour, and community, rather than as aesthetic choices. Contemporary Indian artists continue this ethic through forms of practice that merge community engagement with environmental activism. 

Navjot Altaf’s long-term collaboration on ‘Pilla Gudis’ in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, reflects on ecology, feminism, and climate change through collective making, challenging technocentric futures by grounding art in lived Indigenous ecologies. 

Amar Kanwar’s multimedia work, particularly ‘The Sovereign Forests’, draws from the postcolonial histories of the subcontinent to examine ecological destruction alongside state violence and human exploitation. Through diaries, archives, and collaborative research, he traces industrial interventions in resource-rich tribal regions.

Ravi Aggarwal similarly interrogates ecology through urban contexts, using photography, video, and installations to explore the entanglements of capital, globalisation, and environmental degradation, and to reclaim public space as a site of dialogue. 

Artists such as Atul Bhalla, Arunkumar HG, and Sheba Chhachhi deepen these concerns around water, urbanisation, and the climate crisis. Bhalla approaches water as a carrier of memory and ethical responsibility, while Arunkumar HG uses recycled materials to critique extractive development and ecological imbalance. In ‘The Water Diviner’, Chhachhi evokes submerged histories of water in Delhi, using immersive, speculative forms to warn of futures shaped by environmental neglect.

Against the violence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, environmental art cannot remain merely a passive representation. This making needs to emerge as reclamation, refusal, radical remembering, and resilience. It is from this convergence, and the learnings that emerge through artistic practice, ecological crisis, and decolonial imagination, that I propose Indigenous-Eco-Futurism as both a paradigm and a framework.

INDIGENOUS-ECO-FUTURISM

In the midst of cascading climate collapse, modernity and development, extractive global capital, technological revolutions, and algorithmic logics of containment, we find ourselves living not on the cusp of catastrophe, but within its ongoing casualties. Catastrophe is not an impending future; it is our present condition, historical, material, and psychological. The understanding, then, is not one of preventing catastrophe, but learning how to live with it, through it, and in response to it. Not by way of containment systems or predictive models, but by enacting situated forms of knowledge, ecology, memory, and imagination. In doing so, we begin to articulate a collective process of grief, cultural and ecological mourning, and healing. These are not merely responses to loss, but active forms of resistance, regeneration, and transformation. To imagine the future otherwise, and to live in ‘other worlds’, is to confront dystopic cultural stasis and ignite new possibilities of life amid ruin. 

Technology, in this sense, is not a Western artefact. The Greek word téchne, as Martin Heidegger explains, refers not to machines, but to the art of making, knowledge (ars, poiesis) through doing. Indigenous-Eco-Futurism reclaims this definition and locates technology within everyday life. Cooking, weaving, fermenting, farming, carving, healing, these are technologies of survival, culture, and resistance. They embody ‘first-order cognition’, knowing through the senses, through time, through the land. They are speculative in their own right, reconfiguring the dominant technoscientific imaginations of the Global North and proposing alternate techno-cultures of the South. This grounding of technology as lived, embodied practice reorients knowledge itself as a terrain of resistance, as sensorial, intangible, geospatial, and ancestral ways of knowing are sustained. Indigenous-Eco-Futurism asserts that the path to liberation is not through assimilation into dominant forms of knowledge, but through reclaiming, remixing, and re-situating subaltern and ‘other’ modes of knowing and magic.

Indigenous-Eco-Futurism is both a political articulation and an aesthetic practice shaped by its environment. It is not simply a genre or a mode of representation, but a way of working and knowing rooted in lived experience. It draws from what Jacques Derrida and Paul Thévenin call the ‘subjectile’ – an underlying ground where material, meaning, technique, and relation meet before they harden into representation. In doing so, it holds space for indigenous temporality, ecological wisdom, geospatial consciousness, and embodied technological knowledge. It is a ‘pro-position’ as Bruno Latour reiterates, rooted in struggle, care, and radical hope. It is, at its core, about co-abling futurity: not the future as a horizon determined by neoliberal technocracy or developmentality, but futures that emerge from within, the lived experience, through collaborating with the margins, sustained through relational, grounded imaginings. 

METHODOLOGIES: PLAY, SPECULATION, CO-LABOURING

Within Indigenous-Eco-Futurism, play functions as both ritual and rehearsal, an instinctive imitation through which future skills, social forms, and collective intelligences are cultivated before they are named as knowledge. It is through play that articulation becomes possible, that propositions emerge in opposition to finitude, opening space for error, incompleteness, and process rather than commodification. Play is a method, an epistemology, and a way of being. Play is not frivolous; it is the beginning of all social order.

Anthropologist Leo Frobenius writes that archaic humans “played the order of nature” and recreated cosmic balance through ritual. Play is where instinct meets structure and opens up (deconstructs) meaning. It is an exercise of cognitive and imaginative skills that allow us to perform the self and the world otherwise. It invites messiness, experimentation, repetition, imitation, and magic. Through play, we preserve inherited skills and reconstitute them as potentialities. This is especially critical for marginalised communities whose everyday acts of living are already sites of resistance, reinvention, and memory – genetic and epigenetic. Play becomes a form of co-creation of knowledge – sensorial, communal, and recursive. It contests the closure of knowledge systems by returning us to orality, movement, and body-memory. To imagine futures through play is to invoke speculation and storytelling as tools of epistemic resistance. From ritual and performance to everyday labour, play situates Indigenous-Eco-Futurism as an embodied methodology, where the ego dissolves into shared becoming, where the sacred and the mundane co-exist. This form of expression foregrounds error, incompleteness, and process, in direct opposition to commodification, mastery, or extractive knowledge economies. In this mode, ‘knowing’ is ecological, interdependent, emergent, and always in formation.

Imagination, particularly in the Global South, is often violently curtailed, its aesthetic and political capacities dismissed, devalued, or appropriated, and its people deskilled. Indigenous-Eco-Futurism reclaims imagination as a subaltern act of worlding. Speculative practices, through narrative, performance, or installation, do not just entertain alternate realities; they make space for the articulation of what is otherwise foreclosed. Alondra Nelson highlights futures as those that have always been racialised, gendered, and caste-marked. Indigenous-Eco-Futurism reorients speculation toward the margins, where collective memory, myth, oral tradition, and belief systems interweave with environmental ethics and spiritual consciousness. Storytelling here is not linear but layered, recursive, and iterative. It is a knowledge system in itself, transmitting memory, place, kinship, and aspiration. It weaves together timelines, collapses binaries between past and future, and invokes the present as a space of becoming – pratītyasamutpād. In the context of environmental trauma and climate violence, storytelling becomes a practice of resilience. It offers not only meaning, but a framework for futuring: a way of rehearsing the lives and worlds we wish to build, not just for survival but for joy, care, and liberation.

Stories do not originate in isolation. They emerge from communal processes through co-labouring and shared inquiry. This means dismantling normative pedagogies and knowledge hierarchies. The teacher-student binary, the expert-layperson divide, and the dominant-subaltern split are replaced with the principle of “co-labour-abling”. Through this method, knowledge is not disseminated from above but constructed through interaction and mutual care. The community is the co-author, the site of research, and the audience. The environment is a living participant in this process. This framework foregrounds the geospatial understanding of knowledge as situated and place-based. 

A CASE FOR INDIGENOUS-ECO-FUTURISM: GOA WATER STORIES 

The term Indigenous-Eco-Futurism emerges from Goa, from its rivers, tides, wetlands, dunes, and forests; shaped by layered histories of caste, colonisation, migration, and (re)development. Goa lies within the biodiversity hotspot of the Western Ghats, whose forests regulate monsoons, recharge aquifers, and shelter endemic life. This terrain is more than coastline and climate; it is an ecological and cultural variegation. Rivers, forests, fields, khazans, and mangroves are living archives of caste, labour, and ecological intelligence.

They are sustained through the technologies, rituals, and oral traditions of Kharvi, Kunbi, Dhangar-Gouly, Siddi, Ramponkar, Pagi, Hatkar, Ahir, Khutekar, Vanarmare, and other communities. The gaonkari-comunidade-zamindari continuum spatialised caste into land, inheritance, and access to commons, shaping who tills, fishes or gathers salt. Even indigenous infrastructures such as bunded khazans, nhoi, poi, morrod, and borrod are caste-marked ecologies. Today, forest fires, mining, tourism, mangrove loss, salination, and erratic monsoons erode both ecosystems and memory. What is called climate crisis here is also land alienation, labour invisibilisation, and epistemicide – not merely loss, but dispossession.

Within this framework, ‘Goa Water Stories’ (https://goawaterstories.livingwatersmuseum.org/home) functions as a situated enactment of Indigenous-Eco-Futurism in practice. It takes the form of an immersive, interactive digital web archive, developed through 18 interdisciplinary story-projects created by a cohort of over 30 young researchers, artists, and practitioners working in close collaboration with local and indigenous communities across Goa. The project unfolds through fieldwork, dawn-to-dusk river and coastal visits, community gatherings, workshops, and public presentations in libraries, colleges, universities, museums, and galleries, where hyperlocal narratives of wells, rivers, khazan lands, monsoon cycles, and coastal ecosystems are collectively researched, recorded, and shared. These engagements culminate in a Creative Commons, geo-tagged, multilingual digital platform that brings together videos, photographs, illustrations, audio, and written accounts. Conceived as an immersive, community co-authored archive, it foregrounds water as lived ecology and memory, enabling audiences to navigate Goa’s rivers, wells, khazan lands, monsoon cycles, and coastal ecosystems as relational, place-based experiences rather than static representations.

Unlike representational regimes that extract and aestheticise subaltern experience, these narrative forms operate through consent, co-authorship, and relational accountability. Developed through collective storytelling, play, and co-labouring with local and indigenous communities, the project mobilises digital tools not to abstract or extract ecological knowledge, but to hold space for embodied experience, intergenerational memory, and relational world-making. In this sense, ‘Goa Water Stories’ enacts technology as téchne as an everyday, ethical, and situated practice, a praxis from conceptual proposition to grounded, hydrological futures shaped from within place, care, and community. 

Through this artistic and epistemic practice, Indigenous-Eco-Futurism challenges the established canons of art, science, and futurity. It draws from ecofeminism, punk, magic realism, caste and race studies. It engages speculative fiction, performance art, soundscapes, installation, visual archives, oral poetics, and digital storytelling. It becomes a space of creative insurgency, where the repressed returns as the source of renewal. Critically, this practice does not rely on spectacle or aestheticisation of the other. It insists on validation, accountability, consent, and co-creation. It is not extractive or representative; it is participatory and entangled. The forms it takes are immersive engagements, installations, rituals, workshops, archives, or interventions, and all are co-designed with and by the community. There is no goal or arrival, nor a finality or a product, but an open process in play: of questioning, imagining, experimenting, healing, and growth.

Indigenous-Eco-Futurism offers a framework for thinking beyond survival. It affirms our capacity to shape knowledge, to innovate, to lead, and make anew. It facilitates the shifts of the narrative from lack and loss to abundance and futurity. It reminds us that knowledge production can emerge from grief, from resistance, and from ancestral memory and that the politics of water, land, caste, and ecology are not just crises to manage, but portals through which new worlds can be dreamed. This is not utopian. It is a grounded radicalism. One that understands that the future must be made collectively inclusive. That theory can emerge from the body, the land, the ritual. That co-labouring is not simply sharing work, but sharing care, risk, and imagination. That innovation is not confined to labs or studios, but occurs in kitchens, fields, temples, mangroves, and classrooms. Indigenous-Eco-Futurism is not an art movement or academic theory; it is a form of refusal. A reworlding. A remembering. A resistance. A proposition. A play. A rebellion. An act of creation against the structures that foreclose our dreams. A call to act – together, differently, and now.

This essay is based on the paper ‘Indigenous-eco-futurism’, presented in November 2023 at IMPACT23 – Ecologies of Attention, PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany. The research towards ‘Indigenous-eco-futurism’ was made possible by the generous support of the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the VM Salgaoncar Fellowship.