AgriForum On-Site #2 | A workshop with Gram Art Project in Paradsinga
“When we gather the flowers of Palash, which we use to dye our fabrics, and occasionally also in cooking to lend food a rich hue, we refrain from plucking them. Instead, we look at the flowers on the ground that have naturally fallen off the tree and collect only a fraction of them, leaving the rest for other communities, beings such as birds, insects, and animals, and the soil itself.”
- Aditi Bhattad from the Gram team
On-site #2, organised by FICA under the aegis of the AgriForum and in collaboration with the Gram Art Project at Paradsinga, was a week-long workshop that offered a space for groundedness, slowing down, listening carefully, and walking gently, with the Gram collective’s decade-long process of sustainable living and production catalysing a reflection on conscious being, generous sharing, and recognising the strength of self-organisation. Rooted in Gram’s vision of fostering shared consciousness in everyday life, the week-long workshop offered a process-driven exploration of grounded living. It invited participants to slow down, reflect deeply, and attune to the intricate webs of life and interdependence that shape our existence.
The workshop, supported by the Shyama Foundation’s Shared Ecologies Program and the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, brought together practitioners from diverse agrarian contexts to reflect on critical intersections: land and health, humans and more-than-human entities, the impacts of traditional and modern farming practices, and the power of collective action. Participants Blaise Joseph, Gopa Roy, Gyanwant Yadav, Umesh Singh, Shubham Kumar, Surajit Mudi, and Xewali Deka engaged in material- and form-based explorations alongside the Gram Art Project team, fostering dialogue and collaboration.
The workshop featured insightful sessions with resource persons and creative practitioners, including Prabhakar Pachpute, Shakti Bhatt, Milli Vikamshi, Ravi Raj, Sonal Kumar, and Ayurvedic experts Dr Chandan Banwade and Dr Gayatri Kursunge. Discussions covered topics such as mining and extraction, medicinal foraging, water conservation, and traditional crafts, while Laxminarayan Devda’s documentary P for Pyaaz, P for Paisa, P for Paani sparked conversations about water scarcity in commercial onion farming.
Walks through the farm and forest led by the Gram team provided a deeper understanding of practices that promote conscious consumption by balancing the needs of land, inhabitants, and resources. The FICA team, joined by researcher and artist Stuti Bhavsar, listened and contributed to these dialogues.
There was much interest in unpacking the relationship between land and the body, through the lens of health, stress, and medicinal herbs. Another relation explored was that between human and non-human entities, how tools could be designed and crafted so that the oxen tilling the farm sustains lesser injuries and the farmer using the tools can work with ease. Printing processes such as serigraphy, which make use of chemicals that are toxic to the body and contaminate the natural resources upon disposal, were also in need of being explored to arrive at suitable substitutes.
The workshop was therefore seen as a meeting ground to start a process to address these concerns and questions and using local materials and form-based experiments, collectively create a better solution that is viable in the longer run. The workshop’s day-to-day schedule was planned with these enquiries and interests in mind, and an invitation was extended to other practitioners with a long relationship with Gram whose presentations and insights could catalyse the discussions and processes underway. These presentations, alongside walks in and around the farms and in the nearby forest area, equally shaped the direction that many of the explorations took.
In the first phase of AgriForum, we gathered around key elements of the agrarian landscape—soil, seeds, and tools, among others. At Paradsinga, these conversations deepened and expanded, carrying forward our inquiries into tools, edges and thresholds, notes and forms from the field, attending to the elemental, and the relationship between body and land. At the same time, new perspectives emerged—on extraction, care, and regeneration—leading us to broader sites of exploration: mines, forests, and riverine systems, all deeply entangled with agrarian life. We also turned our attention to the intimate scale of the kitchen garden and the evocative dimension of smell, allowing for fresh readings of the field.
Through these inquiries, overlapping clusters of interest took shape, pointing to the potential for new exchanges and collaborations. The strength of coming together lies not only in the fertile ground it creates for dialogue and shared discourse but also in the space it opens for co-learning, unlearning, and re-learning. By fostering sustainable alliances, we can reimagine ways of engaging with the agrarian and its ecologies—articulating their nuances, making them palpable, and building support structures that sustain both knowledge and practice.
Text by Stuti Bhavsar