Embedded Files
About
About
Flowing Narratives is an exclusive collaboration with Imon Raza, emerging from the 2026 Godrej Design Lab Fellowship, to explore climate futures through a deeply personal and materially grounded cinematic and photographic practice.
The project centres on two rivers : the Brahmaputra in Assam, India, and the Garonne in southwest France - as living archives of ecological memory, cultural identity, and climate vulnerability. Both rivers are experiencing accelerating transformation... the Brahmaputra through erosion, flooding, and displacement, and the Garonne through drought, heatwaves, and shifting agricultural ecologies.
Rather than documenting these rivers from the outside, we work with the rivers themselves, by using their water and sediments as active agents in the photographic development process. In parallel, we are also exploring the lost identities of "climate objects" - items that once held some significance to communities, but which are fast disappearing due to changing narratives brought upon by climate change.
The rivers become not just subjects, but co-authors of this work, and sing to you their flowing narratives.
Project labelled "Living with Rivers" 2026 and also supported by the Embassy of France in India, under the scope of the Indo-French Year of Innovation 2026.Climate Objets
Climate Objets
These artefacts function as material witnesses to environmental transformation, carrying imprinted data, stories, and histories of ecological loss.
Read critically, these objects transcend their utilitarian origins to become archives of displacement and adaptation—signatures of a changing climate inscribed in material form, documenting communities negotiating survival amid accelerating environmental precarity.
From the Eastern Himalayas and Brahmaputra Valley
From the Eastern Himalayas and Brahmaputra Valley
In Assam, these traditional fish-catching and storage implements, designed for particular river channels and flow regimes, are becoming less functional as the Brahmaputra’s morphology and hydrological patterns continue to shift. Their changing use offers material evidence of climate-related change in riverine livelihoods.
In Majuli, the GI-tagged hand-beaten pottery of Salmora which is sustained primarily by women, faces systemic disruption as severe riverbank erosion consumes nearly two-thirds of the island's landmass, displacing settled potter clusters, accelerating the loss of viable alluvial clay deposits along the Brahmaputra, and placing this ancestral material tradition on the threshold of erasure.
Further north in Arunachal Pradesh, Mon Shugu, a thousand-year-old papermaking tradition endemic to Chug Valley and select Monpa settlements, historically developed for inscribing sacred Buddhist scriptures now faces critical endangerment.
As climate variability and ecological stress reduce the wild habitat of the indigenous Daphne paper plant (Shugu Sheng), this heritage process, currently sustained by a small group of women artisans attempting its revival, marks a precarious fracture between specialized ethnobotanical ecosystems, localized material craft, and intangible biocultural survival.
From the Garonne - Occitanie Region
From the Garonne - Occitanie Region
In the Garonne Valley of southwest France, pastel the blue dye obtained from woad (Isatis tinctoria) leaves, traditionally processed into cocagnes, records a history of agricultural abundance and decline.
Once central to Toulouse’s Renaissance economy, the craft nearly disappeared before initiatives such as Bleu de Lectoure began reviving it.
Today, its return to the drought-stressed fields of the Gers and Lauragais remains fragile, shaped by the loss of its former economic networks and renewed climate pressures on cultivation.
Upcoming Exhibitions & Publications
Upcoming Exhibitions & Publications
October 2026 - Assises Nationales du Fleuve, Marseille
October 2026 - International Astronautical Congress, Antalya
December 2026 - Conscious Collective, Mumbai
In Collaboration With
In Collaboration With
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse