Kochi: At a time when the whole world is suffering from climate change, ‘All Is Water And To Water We Must Return’ by Sahil Naik, an artist from Goa, brings the story of a village named Curdi and its people to the ongoing Kochi Muziris Biennale.
The sculptural installation with 5.1 sound and three original compositions from the village recreates the lost world and documents the story that re-frames memory, resists erasure and attempts to restore the identity of a land and its people.
In 1961, soon after Goa got liberated from the Portuguese, the first Chief Minister Dayanand Bandodkar commissioned a modern dam.
Though there were concerns on how the reservoir would submerge 20 villages, forests, mangroves, fields and water bodies around it, the dam was built anyway.
Ten years later, water levels started to rise, submerging the landscape bit by bit.
The villagers were forced to move and over 3,000 families were relocated.
In the 1980s, during the summer, when water-level went down, Curdi, one of the abandoned villages resurfaced, giving space to its former inhabitants to return home. Since then, every summer, hundreds return when the water recedes.
Naik has been working with people of Curdi over the past seven years, documenting the landscapes, oral histories and songs.
“Curdi is a village adjacent to mine. I have tried to look at three time periods. The stories of the elders who know the village before its submergence remain unheard and undocumented, the impact of climate change and the waters on the leftover structures built earlier and the changing rainfall patterns and flash floods. My work is a collective history of the community that once lived in Curdi,” said Naik.
Collecting the stories, Naik worked with the Curdi natives, converted their stories into lyrics and composed three folk songs.
“The only space the village now exists in is their memories. And the songs sung by the villagers are about the memories. Due to global warming, the landscape keeps changing. In the next five to six years, the entire village will vanish. For the coming generations, there won’t be any trace of their village. I have just collected all the memories and created a reservoir of it,” added Naik.
–IANS
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