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e235 lallan – art from the soil
Season 6 Episode 235
- My advice to artists would be drop every garb that you have, drop every piece of knowledge that you think you have. Head to the jungles, head to the rural places. We are living in a time of crisis. We need artists more than the scientists. We need artists more than the healers. We need artists more than anything because arts connect everybody. We need songs, we need stories, we need pictures, we need circles, we need Ubuntu to prosper. Traditional Western ways of, colonized ways of working will not save us as a species. They're not going to help us. They're only going to destroy. And the traditionally arts ecosystem exists like that everywhere in the world. Now we know that it's been going on for hundreds of years. We need to destroy that as artists and we need to head to where our roots are, which is in the soil. And our arts come from there.
I met Lallan (Anirudh Lallan Choudhry) at the Sunshine Himalayan Cottage facility in the Tirthan Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India. The managing host of this facility, Panki Sood, introduced us. Lallan, is a multi-disciplinary artist and socially engaged artist who practice is ‘rooted deep in working with the earthen, on a severe lookout for the conditions which enable genuine co-authors within communities, forming narratives through extra-human design and enquiry’. He is the founder of Baadii, a rural art-house in Himachal Pradesh where he currently lives and is also working on community arts projects at Sunshine Himalayan Cottage with Panki and his team, which you’ll hear about in a few minutes. I want to thank Panki for introducing us and Lallan for this first conversation.
Note: You can hear his latest musical production, Kyun, here). Below is a rough translation of the lyrics :
- Why is the world caught up in making excuses still
- Why are the machines continuously pumping smoke in the air
- By whose permission did we dump all the garbage in the sea
- And who are the idiots building these dams trying to tie free rivers
- What is all this and why is this even
- What is this world that humans are desiring?
- If everything is one day bound to be left here on the ground
- Then what is the use of constant fighting, over and over again?
- And why is it that we fill bombs and continue to drop them on our very own children?
- We are intoxicated by the notions of borders and religion
- And continue to revel in the blashpemy of it all
- So why is this even
- That destruction and more destruction is the only thing we want?
- Those who can be quiet and just listen, where are they?
- Why are my torchbearers full of greed who want to sell the world?
- Those who divide the we into you and me
- Why has everyone chosen them to lead?
- Those who dry down the rivers and erase forests
- Whar are they doing in everyone's share of the earth
- Why are the deprived, still deprived
- What kind of progress is this?
- Wherever you see, its filled of smoke
- What kind of a fire of hatred have they fueled
- Douse it, douse it, douse it
- Let us breathe, of whatever breath is left
- Whatever little is left of life
- Might also die, if you do not stop!
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