On 27 March Goethe-Institut will hold a seminar, ‘Ancestors: Erosion and Emergence,’ the first episode of the multi-part public programme conceptualised as an interdisciplinary events platform of the Gujral Foundation project ‘My East is Your West’ at the 56th Venice Biennale.

The seminar-workshop at the institute’s auditorium observes the broader climate within which territories begin to conform to forms of artificial governance inscribed within the nation-state model. Intertwining aspects of the natural world, geographic features, community and the built environment to assess the rational grid of controlled states set against a subjectivised architecture of the present.

Artist and researcher Nabil Ahmed will engage the geo-history of the Bengal Delta as well as the Asian Arsenic belt  and its interactions with colonial legacy, ecological justice and developmental history, Dhaka-based architect Marina Tabassum will discuss the impact of geographic conditions, living tradition, and matrilineal society upon her architectural practice, and artist-filmmaker Eric Baudelaire will present his recent film Letters to Max (2013) investigating the question of statehood, political agency and the crisis of recognition through the prism of the stateless state of Abkhazia.

In order to extract a contract of belonging, be this to a community, geography, language or faith we are prompted to seek out a narrative of origins. However, such a quest has given shape to systemic violence—in everyday regimes of control, submission and obedience. Along with leading South Asian and international artists, writers, filmmakers and theorists, this events programme will chart a multi-layered timescale of planetary belonging amidst terrestrial, cosmological, and decolonial terrains, to read against the grain of the brief history of nation-state in the divided Indian subcontinent. Surveying geographic connectivity, millennia-old traditions of hospitality, acculturation and oral memory, practices of myth and ritual, these traveling conversations will chart trajectories to re-locate the individual within a collectivity.

Through tracing material histories of the ancestral in the present as a mode of archipelagic thinking, the seminar will try to address some of the most urgent questions of a conflictual present: How shall we produce agency in the matter of earthly inheritance? What lineage of modernity do we wish to continue aligning with? How to institute political and ethical claims that resist the mainstreaming of cultural identity? How are relations between human and non-human entities animating recent discourse on the ‘Rights of Nature’? And, under what non-rational forces of tutelage is knowledge evolving, today?

Besides the seminar, Eric Baudelaire’s film Letters to Max (2014) will be screened at Britto Arts Trust on 27 March 2015 from 12:00noon until 6:00pm.