Ambient Seas

Ambient Seas

Diary Notes
Oct. 12, 2013 to Aug. 17, 2015

Author: Ravi Agarwal

Softbound 60 pages with more than 35 colour plates
Pages with text 22
Published by The Guild

The diary was first released in original on the occasion of Agarwal’s solo exhibition with The Guild on October 11, 2015 at Alibaug.

It has now been published by The Guild in a  limited edition of 500, each signed and numbered. An additional 200 copies have  also been printed which will not be editioned.

Between October 2013 to August 2015, Ravi Agarwal spent time at a small fishing village, near Puducherry.  In association with local fishermen, he sought to explore their cultural and political relationship to the sea, which has been central to them from time immemorial. . A first encounter with the sea and its ecology, it was new grounds for Agarwal’s ongoing exploration about questions of  the politics of sustainability, environmental inequity, and embedded cultural  views through which ideas of ‘nature’ have been formed.  A diary, which was part of the exploration, along with the camera, and an engagement with ancient  Tamil Sangam love-landscape poetry gave rise to a set of new reflections. It  put into sharp  focus, the shifting nature of the social, political and family life of this coastal region.  The diary observations come in a time when  contemporary ideas of the Anthropocene and debates around sustainability have become important. In the context of small fisherman and a different cultural milieu than that projected by the classical human-non-human binary, they bring forth a  set of evocative personal observations.

An excerpt:

“…The beach is always busy. There is activity nearly all the time. Early, predawn the beach comes alive as boats head out to sea. It is still dark, and there is barely enough light to see the silhouettes of the boats. As light strikes the sands, one can see nets, bunched up in piles and covered with plastic tarpaulin. On the far end of the beach are make shift thatched huts, where the fisher-folk store nets, boat parts, anchors, and also sleep in at night.  As the day progresses, the boats start to come in with their catch. The nets are spread out and the fish or rubble caught in them are removed by hand. Some are luckier than others.  The fish are piled in bunches, and it is then one sees the fisherwomen appear. They will take the fish to the local fish market to sell them. The men stay back to clean and if need be, to repair the nets. This activity continues for most of the day, till early forenoon. Some larger boats come in later in the day from their longer trips, and sometimes they need to order in large trucks with crates filled with ice to carry a very large haul to the market. The smaller boats however almost always have a small bag full of catch at best, which needs no trucks or containers to carry them. These are best hauled by hand, like in plastic bags.

The difference in the two economies is distinct and apparent. Economies are not necessarily democratic”