Successful AER resident, Anju Marie Kasturiraj, shares letter of motivation for Nature, Art and Habitat Residency

This performance was informed through my research, which seeks patterns that exist at the intersections of Jungian psychology, South Indian and North American Indigenous plant biology and creation stories, Buddhist cosmology, and postcolonial theory. It was also influenced by family’s cultural background. When my ancestors migrated from Andhra Pradesh to Tamil Nadu, they brought their responsibilities and identities as earthworkers, agriculturalists, and farmers with them. They practiced certain rituals to maintain and venerate the soil. My mother continued these rituals even after migrating to California; planting seeds according to moon cycles and growing her own medicines. This heirloom practice has shown me that ritual is not an adornment or expression of belief, but an act of mutual survival. I carry on these responsibilities as an earthworker through my creative practice, where I strive to make art that honors our kinship to soil; ritual is a core element of my process and final product.

I hope to learn more about regionally specific rituals and practices in the Taleggio Valley through the 2022 Nature, Art, & Habitat Residency program. In return, I will create work in response to the biological histories and mythologies of the land. I want to learn how natural timelines of erosion, growth, and destruction take place, and how local human activity positions itself against or in alignment with these local cycles. I am especially interested in the concept of documenting the way that the Taleggio Valley measures time through its natural cycles, with the hypothesis that it will challenge traditionally accepted heterocapitalist and colonial timekeeping methods. Just as soil is a living memory, our material bodies remember trauma and thousands of years of instinct. I want to explore this, not as a metaphor, but as a method which recognizes soil as both feeding and decomposing, soil as life and death, as the womb holding germinating seeds and as the darkness of a burial. Soil disrupts binaries, especially those which distinguish the self from the other, and can offer an invitation to remove anthropocentric perspectives of climate, harmony, and chaos.

I aim to create a series of clay sculptures, made from water from the Brembo river and local soils. I will position these sculptures around the Taleggio Valley’s different landscapes with the intention of allowing them to naturally degrade, return to the earth, and continue their life cycles. The soil will be sourced from different locations, and I will measure how their different temperaments and environmental factors contributed to their states of malleability, viscosity, and erosion as clay. I will record the sculpture and erosion processes, so I may construct an

experimental landscape film. The film will also depict the human body as a landscape, with no discernment between ecosystems of skin and those of soil. I will film local wildlife in their natural habitats, to be juxtaposed with footage of nearby human settlements and activity in effort to reappropriate and deconstruct the anthropocentric gaze typically applied to nature documentaries. I am interested in collaborating with other residents to create endurance-based performance art, which will be filmed alongside the erosion of the clay sculptures, as alternative time keeping methods.

This practice will continue the work I started in my dissertation, A Mouthful of Soil: The Transubstantiation of Bodies in 1970s Performance Art and Film. The sculptures explore the concept of soil as history; while the figures I create will erode and will no longer be recognizable, the soil still holds the memory. This is an interrogation of how human action can be remedied or not, and how the running parallels between skin and soil can help us deconstruct the desensitizing binaries which position humans as separate from the rest of nature.

During my initial days, I will research the tactile properties of the different soils, and how they respond to the clay-making process. This has the opportunity to be a socially engaged practice, as clay-making is an accessible method of gathering different members of a community together, and has been a communal tradition around the world, starting with our earliest ancestors. At this time, I will also draw inspiration for what the clay figures will embody; I am especially interested in creating figures representing local mythologies, human likeness, extinct species, and miniature depictions of landforms that previously existed in the area. I will film: the clay-making process, the erection and natural destruction of the clay sculptures, footage of local fauna and local human activity, and a series of short endurance performances paired alongside the sculptures’ erosion. My work in the Taleggio Valley will culminate in a film which measures time according to nature and explores the fluid genealogical, ancestral, and physical relationships humans have with soil.

I conduct this research and practice with the incentives to contribute to the goals of NAHR’s mission and to enrich my own relationship to the natural world through methods that centralize collectivism and global responsibility to the land. I am deeply curious to learn the local, true names for the Valley’s flora and fauna, to listen to the stories sung by migrating winds, and to find warmth in the narrative being woven in protest of time, language, and productivity by the natural world’s eternal ephemerality. As my creative practice has largely taken place in cities, I am grateful for the potential opportunity to conduct this work in a place of duality – returning to my roots somewhere I have never grown before.