About Us
ग्राम is pronounced “Gram” which means Village
The Gram Art Project is a rural collective of individuals: women, farmers, artisans, artists. These identities often intersect and overlap. At the heart of it, we are trying to build a shared consciousness in our daily living that is rooted in sovereignty.
We live, work, and play in and around the village of Paradsinga, in Madhya Pradesh, India. Our village and its people are like any other—suffering “development” that has been destroying our ecological and social harmony, reeling under cycles of debt-ridden agriculture, migrating to more urban areas in search of dignity and employment, and hurting under a patriarchal and hierarchical system.
With this as our backdrop, we are consciously trying to hold space for multiplicities; we are only one part of an intricate and delicate web, and our care encompasses all human and non-human beings.
For us, art is not just a professional practice but a way of expressing ourselves in ways we find meaningful. The vital and trivial are both things we encounter while living our lives, and our work reflects this.
Sometimes it takes the form of seed paper and seed bands, sometimes land art, and at other times, live performances, but all of them are formed on the bedrock of social and ecological non-exploitation. We are trying, in myriad ways, to express the reality of being in an average village—how it shapes us, and we, in turn, shape it.
Structure
The Gram Art Project operates within a three-fold structure.
1. Social
The Collective, which is our community-based parent body, falls under this category. All our work stands on the tenets of sovereignty, collective consciousness building, democratic decision making, and non-exploitation.
2. Commercial
Beejpatra, our commercial entity, is registered with the Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises, Government of India. A large part of the production planned under the Gram Art Collective’s social structure is traded through Beejpatra.
Rural Outsourcing Services, which does satellite imagery based geo-mapping and structural drawings for GeoMitra Solutions is another one of our commercial enterprises.
3. Non-commercial
Caring Mitra Foundation (CMF), our partner for non-commercial activities, is used for fund-raising activities. The CMF has both the 12A and 80G certification, and audited reports from the past three years. Through the CMF’s ally organisations that are registered under the FCRA, we are able to receive foreign funds as well.
Polycrisis
Our understanding of the polycrisis (current issues that we, as a society, are facing):
Socio-Political
We live in a society where most of our individual choices are a result of someone else’s personal interests. These interests, more often than not, do not align with what’s best for the society or the individual making that particular choice. These choices start right from defining our own identity & identity-based roles to living a particular way oflife. Identities that have been living in a perpetual state of crisis as a result of socio-political realities we live in are:
i) Birth-based identities and the life that follows. For example, being born as a non-male or a male who doesn’t conform to the conventional way of being a male, being born in a non-dominant caste or religion, being born in a tribal, rural or urban slum-dwelling family.ii) Professional identities and the life that follows. For example, being a primary producer, be it a farmer, shepherd, fisherfolk or a hunter-gatherer, being an artisan who fulfils local needs using local resources, service provider of tasks that are considered as menial, being a worker or a labourer.
iii) Factors that are responsible for these socio-political realities are,a. Undemocratic decision-makingb. Non-participatory planning & implementational approachesc. Corporate-favouring policy developmentd. State-controlled media & judiciarye. Opaque information disseminationf. Dismantling of a secular social environmentg. Cultural monopolisation & intolerance
As a way to tackle this crisis, we need to strengthen our work towards building people’s sovereigntyover resources & means of production. True democracy has to be established which is decentralised andincludes people in decision-making, planning and implementation processes.
Ecological
The earth & the living world has survived five mass extinction events. We are now living through the sixth. Scientific community calls it The Holocene extinction, or more recently as the Anthropocene extinction as a result of human activity. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the standard rate of extinction in Earth’s geological and biological history before humans became a primary contributor to extinctions. In this context, it is only logical, scientific & maybe the last resort, that we find alternatives to the current way of how we, humans, operate as a species. How do our production & consumptions systems work? & Start moving away from anthropocentric thinking & systems and take a holistic approach to rectify our wrongs.
We need radical approaches to slow down the bio-diversity loss that is happening & mitigate climate change. This requires us to:
i) Root out consumerism from our society.
ii) Re-imagine the way our production and consumption systems work.
iii) Engage with local communities to find solutions on how to manage the Commons, forests & water-bodies.
Technological
Technology has historically been a tool to empower communities to manage
ecological stresses using local resources at the same time helped those in power to maintain
it more efficiently, many times in a more authoritarian way. But since the industrial
revolution, technology has been instrumental in rather doing the later than the former. It
has given rise to capitalism, accumulation of wealth and power, increased speed of
extraction of resources at an unprecedented speed & scale.
Technological advancement has destroyed local livelihoods and replaced production by the
masses with mass production. This has been at the cost of artisans, local communities, eco-
system and consumers as well. Mass production has, on contrary to popular theory of
economies of scale, given bullying powers to capitalists to force the state to create policies
that increases their profits and gives them control over resources, rather than work towards
the greater good.
We, today, need efforts to democratise technology in terms of its development, ownership
and implementation. It should not be the tool to turn humans into machines, take
proprietary control over people’s resources by cooking-up ideas & laws such as Intellectual
Property Rights (IPRs).
It isn’t just enough that the end use of a new technology is ecologically safe, but it is also
important to look at the process it comes from, the resources it has consumed, the waste it
has produced in the process and people’s involvement in its culmination.
2.4. Way of our understanding of truth / reality: Historically, what is true &