We Cannot Let Go Of This Earth, 2025
video and text
10 minutes, 19 seconds
Languages: Kui, Odia, Hindi, English
With photographic images overlaid with rushes of video and audio excerpts, this project foregrounds the landscapes and narratives of community members who opposed proposed mining projects on their land. Documented in Odisha, India, from 2010-2012, this research consists of interviews, informal conversations, and everyday life with community members. They describe the history of their hills, the arrival of the company, the destruction caused by local mining projects, and the state violence that the community has been subject to for their opposition to mining.
The transcript of the audio is included as a separate text, with timestamps that correspond to the timestamps in the video. This gesture reflects the process of knowledge building in participant observation methods, which involves a daily presence with the community – listening, recording, gathering traces and fragments offered during conversation – and then piecing these together to form connections and narratives. It implicates the viewer in this process of translations, referents, slippages and incompleteness.
In looking at this conflict, the project considers how postcolonial governments have continued policies of displacement and extraction, and how research-based approaches attempt to navigate the complex networks of land, body and identity within this contemporary terrain. The title of the work connects it to a companion text, “The Earth Cannot Let Go of Us’: Analysing Ontological Conflicts,” published in Ethnos in 2016, which examines the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in the South Asian context. The words in these titles are taken from a Dongria Kondh leader, whose voice features in the audio.
Translation support provided by Living Farms, Odisha. Production supported by 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi.
Text Design: Samantha Ong
Install: Madhurjo Dey, Ananthu Pa
AV Support: Jibril and Rishi, Ajay Krishnan, Milan Johnson
Languages: Kui, Odia, Hindi, English
With photographic images overlaid with rushes of video and audio excerpts, this project foregrounds the landscapes and narratives of community members who opposed proposed mining projects on their land. Documented in Odisha, India, from 2010-2012, this research consists of interviews, informal conversations, and everyday life with community members. They describe the history of their hills, the arrival of the company, the destruction caused by local mining projects, and the state violence that the community has been subject to for their opposition to mining.
The transcript of the audio is included as a separate text, with timestamps that correspond to the timestamps in the video. This gesture reflects the process of knowledge building in participant observation methods, which involves a daily presence with the community – listening, recording, gathering traces and fragments offered during conversation – and then piecing these together to form connections and narratives. It implicates the viewer in this process of translations, referents, slippages and incompleteness.
In looking at this conflict, the project considers how postcolonial governments have continued policies of displacement and extraction, and how research-based approaches attempt to navigate the complex networks of land, body and identity within this contemporary terrain. The title of the work connects it to a companion text, “The Earth Cannot Let Go of Us’: Analysing Ontological Conflicts,” published in Ethnos in 2016, which examines the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in the South Asian context. The words in these titles are taken from a Dongria Kondh leader, whose voice features in the audio.
Translation support provided by Living Farms, Odisha. Production supported by 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi.
Text Design: Samantha Ong
Install: Madhurjo Dey, Ananthu Pa
AV Support: Jibril and Rishi, Ajay Krishnan, Milan Johnson
Installation image by Joseph Rahul and the KMB Photo Team.
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