Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) announces an Open Call for participants in its latest critical art writing workshop:

Writing Ecologies: Critical Discourse, Public Art and the Environment. 
 
The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Yamuna-Elbe Public Art Initiative, curated by Ravi Agarwal and Till Krause.

It is conceptualized and facilitated by art critic and independent curator Maya Kóvskaya.
 
The Writing Ecologies workshop seeks ambitious, thoughtful writers interested in exploring the intersection of contemporary art, the natural environment, the public sphere, and the role that critical discourse production through art writing can play in expanding, enlarging, recasting or changing the terms of the dominant discourse surrounding related questions.
 
Slated to take place over three weekends during the month of November, 2011, the workshop will be devoted to the practice and craft of critical art writing and grounded empirically in questions about the fate the natural environment in contemporary society, and art in the public sphere, that are raised by the Yamuna-Elbe project.
 
The workshop is concerned with ecologies in several sense of the word: the natural/biological ecologies of natural resources such as rivers in urbanized contexts like Delhi and Hamburg; the constructed/relational socio-economic ecologies of sweeping macro-processes such as “modernization,” “industrialization,” and “urbanization,” as well as competing local micro-economies and livelihoods of people on the margins of the dominant socio-economic order, in contrast to the role played by 'Global Capital'; the ecologies of habitualized practices of everyday life, patterns of consumption, and conservation and/or waste, and dominant conceptions about our relationship to water and nature; the ecologies of discourse production in the popular imaginaries of both mass and alternative media, and the public sphere, surrounding issues pertaining to environmental degradation and conservation; as well as ecologies of discourse surrounding the possible roles that public art interventions can play in challenging or shifting the dominant paradigms for understanding our relationship to, and quotidian practices vis-à-vis, the natural environment.