STRANGER’S INTIMACY
The lithographs based on drawings by Walter S. Sherwill, show the Patna Opium Factory in 1850’s. An attempt has been made to explore alternative webs of relationships which could exist between human bodies and the aquabeing through new ecologies and ecosystems, to reimagine threads of relationships that might be moving us closer to a sustainable way of existing with each other. For example, the nature of this relationship??? Inspired by the work of Donna J haraway (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene) where she talks about the recuperation in complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, as beginnings; the illustration shows amphibians as a representation of dying’s becoming living; endings which transforms marine life and humans as a representation of beginnings.
The illustration talks about how species become-with each other and the interaction between predators, preys, and parasites may coexist in the future. The underwater environment is thought to be an ecotone for the origin of life, and it remains as the ecological region most critical to support life and the natural habitat of the majority of living organisms. I imagine the underwater environment to be hostile for humans and other species in many ways where the rendering proposes patterns for multispecies to co-inhabit underwater. A number of human activities are imagined in the more accessible parts (represented on the left side of the collage and intentionally marginalized representing a decentering of the human in the ecology) of the underwater environment where communities of organisms that are dependent on each other and on their environment coexist within the aquatic ecosystems.
Ecotone | The Sentient Ruins 