Some reflections from Namrata Narendra's Critical Pathways Fellowship 2024
where are we at?
A Collective Imaginarium workshop facilitated and organised at Casco Art Institute during my Critical Pathways Fellowship at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ.
From November to December 2024, I was awarded the Critical Pathways Fellowship to expand academic discourse by amplifying more-than-human and marginalised lives and perspectives. During this time, I was hosted by Dr. Flora Roberts at the Department of History and Art History at the Faculty of Humanities. As a conclusion to my fellowship, I organised and facilitated a Collective Imaginarium Workshop: An explorative, hands-on, imaginaries activity through which we observed, questioned and expressed the historical, current and possible future relations between humans, other-than-humans and the site we were situated in, focusing on ‘invisible’ elements such as groundwater, soil properties, pipelines, insects etc. The differing backgrounds and perspectives contributed to a visual tapestry constructed and created with foraged elements from the site.
Over the course of two weeks, I also facilitated conversations around the question: How do we collectively weave together our compulsions, our emerging collaborations, contestations between non-human agency and our immediate natural and constructed landscapes? I hoped to nudge a creative tilt to the way we view research subjects and landscapes, basing it on my past work in social ecology and arts based grounded research methods.
Read more about her experience on her website.
