DIALOGUE AROUND SITESPECIFIC ART ACTIVITY: February 2015

Re-encountering “NATURE” -Bhaskar Hazarika

7.2.2015

For a hour, I made myself cut off from the world where I am habituated to live, -‘the urban world’ and trying to understand what is the urge that worked behind my personal choice of having a temporary exile in this farm with many trees, weeds, animals, insects, birds, pond and agriculture. Keeping the mobile phone switch off, I was sitting under trees alone. That situational placement of ‘me’ in a jungle always provokes the memory and takes me to different time than the real time. That memory is probably about the missing link between the modern man and the ‘nature.’ If the two sides of the same coin are- civilized (or modern) and the savage, or the raw and cooked, then for a time being, I was trying to locate myself in the ‘raw’ side of the coin. Is the return of modern man to the raw nature possible? Perhaps, this is not such attempt too, but that question will be always asked to the man who tries to return.

The modern man has been always going into the ‘nature’ only and only to consume it. There is no alteration of that approach is ever seen. Or if there is any alternative approach applied then that is to give the justification against modern man’s exploitation of ‘nature.’

Here, the farm is a modern man’s initiative to revisit nature with minimum intervention. The attempt is of course the demand of our time and evolved from the crisis of being an endangered one, but with a slightly different methodology and approach. This attempt must be appreciated because it is an experiment to re-search the methodology of co-existence.

Is it a romantic one, seeing or enjoying ‘nature’? Or is it beautiful? A bunch of trees, a pond, birds, cows- are they meaningful? The nature is as it is. The objects of nature are raw and do not carry any kind meaning until unless we impose that meaning from our desire over them. A flower is not beautiful at all because that beauty is our desire. It is the desire of enjoying or consuming that flower other way. Here, what I felt is that, I always know that, in nature what I am looking for. But is nature watching me? How the nature reacts in my presence, is my idea of intervention in ‘Nature.’

A bed of dead woods and their poems -Bhaskar Hazarika

19th Feb. 2015

Today, I have spent a long time with the dump of tree trunks. I slept, sit, walked, and crawled over the dead wood pieces to take all possible bodily experience of being with them. I was experiencing their rough surface, wet smell, sizes, weight and the space defined by their presence in cluster. Then I made a shell for me with the woods like a bed of woods set for the funeral fire.

I remember the poems on “nature,” those I read in my childhood. After searching a while, I found a decayed book of poems - Marua Phul (in Assamese) in my bookshelf where there are many romantic poems on “nature” and wonders of her. I am going to read this decayed book and its poems on “mother nature” again in that wood shell as once upon a time I used to read them in my home.