This residential workshop, uses the garden as a lens for engagement with architecture, art, and ecology. A range of local and international facilitators will take 11 participants, selected through an open call, through sessions on building a speculative counter-archive with Setareh Noorani (Netherlands), experiencing the garden through an ecological lens with Prof. Sarath Kotagama (Sri Lanka), and uncovering bodies as repositories of knowledge with Umeshi Rajeendra (Sri Lanka). Guided sessions will be interspersed with boat excursions to the Honduwa island for sightings of Hog Deer at dawn, opening up acts of active reading and exchange with Colomboscope in the “To Lunuganga” reading room, star gazing and a special film screening of 'Bawa's Garden' (2022). Hailing from Jaffna, Monaragala, Badulla, Batticaloa, Aluthgama and Colombo, the cohort consists of emerging architecture students, architects, artists and designers.
Facilitators
Photo Credit: Floor Besuijen, Nieuwe Instituut
Setareh Noorani (b. 1995, The Netherlands) is an architect, researcher and curator at the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), and is part of various experimental collectives. She uses various media in her projects and artistic contributions to explore ways of publicising and embodying, questioning processes of trauma and time; always moving in the grey space between academic research and art. Her current (curatorial) research at the Nieuwe Instituut focuses on the qualitative, paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, non- institutional representations, and the implications of the collective, more-than- human body in architecture, its heritage and ambiguous future scenarios. She was part of the curatorial team of the London Design Biënnale 2023 and its Remapping Collaborations Working Group, and involved in the selection committees of the yearly Nieuwe Instituut Call for Fellows. Setareh holds a master’s degree (MSc) in Architecture (TU Delft, cum laude).
Photo Credit: Diluckshan Puviraj
Sarath Kotagama is a Sri Lankan ornithologist and environmentalist. He holds a BSc from the University of Colombo and a PhD from the University of Aberdeen, focusing on the behavioural ecology of the rose-ringed parakeet. Kotagama served as a lecturer at the University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka, and as Director of the Department of Wildlife Conservation. He was appointed Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Colombo and later became Professor Emeritus. Kotagama has been a consultant to various organisations and held leadership roles in conservation societies. He received the "2003 Distinguished Service Award for Environment Education and Journalism" from the International Society for Conservation Biology. The endemic toad species Duttaphrynus kotagamai was named in his honour. In 2017, he was awarded the title of Vidya Jyothi by the Government of Sri Lanka.
Photo Credit: Alice Carfrae
Umeshi Rajeendra is Sri Lankan/Ilankai born dance artist, educator, and choreographer whose artistic and academic pursuits address intersectional solidarity through the production of original works since 2012. Umeshi received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Dance from University of the Arts, USA, where she was one of the recipients of the President's Fund for Excellence, and she also received a Bachelor of Arts in Dance and Economics from Denison University, USA. She has worked with renowned international artists such as Dada Masilo, Netta Yerushalmy, Jesse Zaritt, Sandra Mathern-Smith, Julie Fox, Stafford Barry, and Olivier Tarpaga and gained extensive experience in America, Europe, and South Asia. Umeshi is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of MeshGround, A Platform for Movement Arts, and is currently also a visiting lecturer at universities, striving to unearth our embodied relational agency, where discomfort, difference and alterity are embraced to challenge our performativity.
We Are From Here is a multidisciplinary artist collective formed by Firi Rahman and Parilojithan Ramanathan. With a focus on Slave Island, a rapidly developing location in the centre of Colombo, their ongoing project explores the threat of socio-political intersections that are gradually being erased for inequitable economic and political drivers that subsequently displaces residents. Firi Rahman’s work often considers the threatened codependent relationships that people and endangered species have with their natural, lived and built environments. Parilojithan Ramanathan is from Batticaloa, Sri Lanka and works with lens-based mediums, primarily dealing with nostalgia and memory.
Creative Island – From Forest School to Sensory Architectures is a project by EUNIC Sri Lanka, Colomboscope, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and Kälam (Jaffna). EUNIC — European Union National Institutes for Culture — is Europe’s network of national cultural institutes and organizations, with 36 members from all EU member states and associated countries. EUNIC Sri Lanka - consisting of the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut, the British Council, the Italian Embassy, and the Dutch Embassy - adopts an integrated approach to building cultural relations and creative collaborations and supporting diversity.
