Social Witnessing

Christoph Rosol (moderator), Ravi Agarwal, Huiying Ng, Paulina Lopez, Michelle Lai

Oct. 31, 2020

Presentations

11:30-12:10: The Desert of the Anthropocene
With Ravi Agarwal & Paulina Lopez

12:10-12:50: Re-earthing through collective study: Finding a social semiotics of agroecological Futures
With Huiying Ng & Michelle Lai

Witnessing just how a changing landscape can develop is quite a difficult task; one that requires a number of different accounts, traces, and ways of documenting that can be difficult to pin down. These two case study presentations focus on two very different landscapes and attempt to account for the changing relationships that make them over time.

Geographer Huiying Ng renders a spatial ethnography of the urbanizing landscape of Chiang Mai province of Thailand and their relationship to alternative agroecology. Through a compendium of images, archival materials, maps and videos, artist and researcher Ravi Agarwal shares an ongoing project that formulates personal memories of his desert homeland near the city of Jaisalmer whose “barren” landscape has been forever altered as a result of a 650 km canal running from the city to the Indus Valley in a post-colonial modernization process.