Goa's Dying Mangroves And The Art Of Climate Change Activism

Growing up as a single child at the psychiatric hospital campus in Lucknow, I would often seek companionship and play spaces. Mostly, my playmates were dolls, and a discarded thermocol medicine box, my doll house. Come evening, the overhanging canopy of a small tree, teeming with birds, squirrels, butterflies, and bees, became our home. Sitting with my tribe under the canopy-sheltered sky, feeling the breeze and the sunshine filter through, I felt at peace.

Decades later, this oasis of a childhood memory resurfaced hauntingly. In 2021, Cyclone Tauktae uprooted a large, old mango tree in our garden in Goa. The tree came down with a gut-wrenching thud. It felt as if the canopy—my safe and happy space—had been wrecked. 

Around this time, I was also part of an art residency, Mandalas for Mollem, intended as an artistic response to three controversial government projects, for which 250 hectares of protected forest land in the Bhagwan Mahavir Sanctuary and Mollem National Park were earmarked for clearing. 

The deep sense of loss evoked by the uprooted mango tree only foreshadowed the impending devastation of a habitat older than the Himalayas. I made two decisions, one personal and the other related to my artistic practice. I resolved to replant, nurse the tree and channelise the pervading ecological grief towards healing and stewardship. As both ‘projects’ required more than personal resolve, community collaboration came to my aid as did art.

In Pics | Aamche Mangrove: The Fragile Mangrove Ecosystem Of Goa

I used the pruned branches of the mango tree to create seven arboreal 'Guardian Goddesses' or माँ-Tree-काs, as I eventually called them. To me, they embodied our collective spirit to stand up against the destruction of our natural heritage. It also opened some deep and personal questions for me. When we love something and it dies, we grieve its passing. Yet, how do we hold a wake for this unending cycle of ecological deaths? How do we break our mechanical gaze and pause to reflect on the collapse and the rebuilding?

I felt drawn to invite a few close friends and artists to join me in processing these feelings of overwhelming helplessness, grief and anger. We questioned why we felt so lost and disconnected. British environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy’s statement stood out for me at this juncture: “We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So, when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”

When we are lost, we need to reorient/re-centre ourselves by going inwards. The Mandala is an age-old tool used across cultures for transformation. The माँ-Tree-काs aided our process. They formed the 10th circle of the Mandala that I laid out under the shelter of a large banyan tree. The circumambulatory consecration and grief ritual that followed was collective mourning and a prayer, an embodiment of our union with nature, a re-centre to the core.   

Art is transformative. In the process, there is an excavation and examination of layers, a deeper understanding of self and one’s environment. It paves the way for a spiritual, psychological, and energetic shift. This alchemical coming together of my own inner journey aided by the guardian dolls and the disruptive happenings in the external world, brought about a distillation of my practice and marked my initiation into environmental art.

In the age of climate change, artists are more crucial than ever. Effective action on human-caused climate change requires more than just scientific facts, and art has for long galvanised resistance. 

I strongly felt the need to hold space for community engagement in matters of environmental concern through artistic interventions to elicit meaningful responses on ground. A sense of collective agency empowers one to seek a way forward towards positive renewal. In my role as a gallerist and curator at the Gallery Gitanjali in Goa, I enjoyed bringing together communities to experience, engage and respond to art. These threads became the warp and woof of the 'Earthivist Collective'.

The destruction of a vast stretch of mangroves along the Panaji-Bambolim NH-66 stretch is the recent price environment had to pay at the altar of haphazard development in Goa. Mangroves are a complex ecosystem and inherent protectors of coastal areas, acting as natural barriers against climate change. Watching the deliberate destruction of these beautiful, resilient beings and their unnoticed disappearance from the news space was painful.

The Collective’s first project, Aamche Mangrove, was conceived to increase sensitisation towards the importance of mangroves. It drew concerned citizens from a variety of backgrounds; artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, educators, academicians and environmentalists.

Trees to be felled are marked in red. Our first intervention at the site of destruction, entitled Mangrave: (En)circling the Loss involved creation of a spiral installation around the dead mangroves, banded in red fabric. We activated the site with several performances, including a public act of mourning and a prayer for healing and renewal, forming a human chain with children and draping the spiral ropeway with gauze-sheets, as a symbolic prayer flag for healing. 

When one makes public art, it is with the hope of holding space. This space becomes a portal, to access and acknowledge emotions, to articulate them, to dialogue with them, and through this experience, make us feel less alone. These art-based community engagements further gave impetus to the formation of the 'Khazan Society of Goa', a citizen-support system to revive and support Goa’s existing green infrastructure of the khazan system to build resilience against climate change fallouts. 

As I write this, I’m alive to the child in me, deeply nourished by nature and at home with her dolls under the canopy of a tree. It’s as if the same tree is calling out to me to respond to the devastation of its kin. My dolls are now the sparse, primitive माँ-Tree-काs and a gauze-plaster cast of me, aiding me and my collective to heal and stand up for the loss of our home.