BITTER SWEET
"Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are"
- Jean Brill
Bitter sweet is an interactive play written to work as a participatory research piece, based in Bidar, Karnataka. The narrative rides on the question of what self sufficiency or food dependence is for the people who grow it for us. Through the medium of critical making, the work explores the question of what self sufficiency would mean in a farmers life in the context of the green revolution, commercial farming through the three generations that reside in the village. The story takes a turn at multiple points owing to the intersectional transparent nature of food.
Team : Individual
Role: Research, Writing
Tools: Action Research, Practice based research, Critical Making
Duration: 3 months | Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology X Team YUVAA
X Living Labs Network
BRIEF
The focus of the project was to explore creative practice as an act of listening and negotiating to enunciate the everyday use, maintenance and future of these water structures. Capabilities and learning outcomes
1. Carry out practice-based & place-based research in collaboration with communities from respective micro-contexts
2. Combine making with ethics in practice to co-develop grounded methods to coproduce outcomes, outputs, artworks or artefacts
We will facilitate and explore collaborations in interdisciplinary teams and transdisciplinary modes of action-research. With each one of you bringing your own creative practice to collectively design research methods and co-develop outcomes that can initiate a dialogic process to understand the multiple modes of conservation and development trajectories relevant to the listed micro-contexts above. The intent is not to solve but to support through creative practises.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
ABSTRACT
Vollokoti is a small hamlet housed within the walls of the Bidar fort and Hamilapur, an area lying outside the fort is composed of fairly larger village settlements. A common thread between these locations are the agricultural practices taking place in these areas that serve as primary livelihood generators for the people. Taking these locations as epicenters of research, this project aims to understanding the evolution of diets with the change in farming practices over time and its overarching effect on the health and well being of farmers.
CRITICAL INQUIRY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS
During our fieldwork, eating with the locals at temples and local food from eateries made the kind of food eaten in rural areas versus the urban very evident. Unlike the urban setting where our food choices are almost perennial as we eat similar food all through the year, in a rural setting the food people eat is based largely on what they grow and availability which means that local diets naturally change seasonally. However, several factors diversify or alter the diets of the people, say historically invasions by several other communities made availability of certain ingredients available, influencing the culinary practices. The availability of water and change in techniques of farming could have also changed what people eat over the generations. For instance, what made puranpoli an essential dish with sugarcane being a highly water intensive crop? What other food practices evolved or changed over time? Similarly, the presence of spicy food, the descriptions of cool and warm food that the farmers mentioned visibly coincided with their crop cycles seasonally and was a response to their geographical conditions. This led to the inquiry of how food adaptation as a response to on their availability and natural conditions works. Additionally, considering the lifestyles of farming communities to be highly labour intensive jobs with farmers of all ages on their feet all day, what culinary practices did they adopt to support the nature of work and what effect does it have on their health and wellbeing? Thus the primary inquiry for this project lies in understanding the relationship between crops grown and local food cultures and adaptations that are a result of it. The aim is to also examine this relationship through the lens of how market forces and introduction of non indegenious methods have played a role in changing the culinary practices of the people in the context and the effect it has had on their health and wellbeing. Traditionally local knowledge systems would thus be inevitably used as a basis for supporting and understanding this larger inquiry.
CREATING LEARNING ARTEFACTS
FIELDWORK
During our fieldwork, eating with the locals at temples and local food from eateries made the kind of food eaten in rural areas versus the urban very evident. Unlike the urban setting where our food choices are almost perennial as we eat similar food all through the year, in a rural setting the food people eat is based largely on what they grow and availability which means that local diets naturally change seasonally. However, several factors diversify or alter the diets of the people, say historically invasions by several other communities made availability of certain ingredients available, influencing the culinary practices. The availability of water and change in techniques of farming could have also changed what people eat over the generations. For instance, what made puranpoli an essential dish with sugarcane being a highly water intensive crop? What other food practices evolved or changed over time? Similarly, the presence of spicy food, the descriptions of cool and warm food that the farmers mentioned visibly coincided with their crop cycles seasonally and was
