Artist-Researcher
NL - IND
01. The Criminal Tribes
02. (Dis)Locating Design Globalisms
03. Footprints of the Celestial Dancers
04. Living Knowledges of the Endangered
05. Vessel of the Daivas
Bio
Artist-Researcher
NL - IND
01. The Criminal Tribes
02. (Dis)Locating Design Globalisms
03. Footprints of the Celestial Dancers
04. Living Knowledges of the Endangered
05. Vessel of the Daivas
Bio
2024
On December 7th, 1972, from a distance of approximately 45,000 kms from the planet’s surface, the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft captured the Earth in an iconic photograph called The Blue Marble. The image of Earth suspended in the vast expanse of space, fragile and vulnerable, became the poster child of several movements transforming consciousness of the globe and the global around the modern world. The image not only paraded the great feats of American technology, but also carried with it the alluring promise of modernity. Enmeshed somewhere in the radio waves set Earth-bound, broadcasted from the spaceship, was a message for mankind - that we are all one people, inhabiting one world. However, the image itself, is a host to many worlds. It is through the worlds pushed to the margins of this global image that this essay unfolds from.
The Blue Marble, 1972, Earth as seen by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft, as featured in Nabil Ahmed’s research project ‘Earth Poison’, departs from the Blue Marble. His work unravels the complex entanglements of the ecological and political violences that unfolded at the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. Bangladesh’s struggle for political independence ran parallel with an environmental catastrophe that left the land in ruin, claiming the lives of over 400,000 and impacting the lives of millions more – The Cyclone Bhola, which incidentally can be seen to the far north-east in this iconic image.
The Stage is Set. A poverty-stricken India, desperate to avert another impending famine, became the grandest theatre of operations for the Green Revolution in the 1960’s. An agricultural movement launched by the Rockefeller foundation, the Indian agricultural ministry and Monsanto, that sought to revolutionize agriculture across a newly independent India and beyond. The farming model that promised to end world hunger, was one that converted vast lands into mono-crop plantations of genetically modified seed. The engineered seed and the techno-chemical environments it demanded, were imported into India en masse by American multi-national corporations, creating colossal infrastructures of dependence, monopoly and extraction.
Juxtaposition, Hybrid corn seeds ready for Distribution, Hand Dusters in India, Dwarf Wheat Tests, Rockefeller Archives, 1965 - 75
The stark image shows farmers using hand dusters for when the soil was too wet to support heavy equipment in the monsoons. The implementation of modern equipment and systems, inexorably meant the displacement of local ways of relating to land.
It is 1977, a group of industrial design engineers in the Hague publish a technical report on the evolution, uses and rationale of hand pumps for drinking water in developing countries. The report was commissioned by the United Nations Development Program – who only a few years prior took on the colossal project of installing around a million hand pumps in Bangladesh with an aim of providing people with safe drinking water. The UNDP, inspired by the perceived success of the Green Revolution was one of a few major humanitarian organizations that rushed into Bangladesh, to claim a hand in its
reform. A Bangladesh facing ruin from its struggle for political independence (1971) and a cyclone (1970), would be hit by yet another plague - this time around, a plague unleashed by design. The UNDP’s hasty handpumps had exposed tens of millions of people to underground aquafers rich in arsenic – one of the deadliest Earth Poisons.
The essay attempts to bring into critical view, how the practice of modern design is historically rooted in the neo-colonial and imperial project of so-called “development.” By examining the asymmetric migration of design from the West to the Global South (with its underlying values, systems, economies, philosophies, humanisms and materialisms) the essay poses a vital call to designers today, to reflect on the epistemic territories of their practices - what worlds are present within a practice? And what worlds are rendered invisible through the practice of design?