Rustom Bharucha

Rustom Bharucha

Professor, International Fellow of the British Academy London, Kolkata, India

Expanding the Museum-making Imaginary: Learning to Learn from Ecology

Drawing on principles of impermanence, ecology, and humility, embedded in the traditional practice of floor-drawings, this talk will tease out the possibilities of these principles in catalyzing new processes of museum-making. Seeking to work outside the colonial strictures of established museums in a spirit of conversation rather than a predetermined blueprint, it will attempt to explore a new epistemology of what a museum could be in a context of scarcity and absence of professional infrastructure. How does one learn from erasure rather than an accretion of resources? How does one place one’s faith in the ordinary – that which lies in front of us but which we fail to see? The experimental ground in question is a desert museum in Rajasthan that has attempted to sustain itself on the terrain of an abandoned sandstone mine, where the absence of museumization has been countered by the unprecedented gifts of nature. How may one “learn to learn” these lessons of ecology with a new aesthetics of care? Can museums unlearn their dominant epistemes in search of new experiments on the borders of creative risk and positive failure?

Biography:

Rustom Bharucha is a writer, cultural critic and dramaturg based in Kolkata, India. An International Fellow of the British Academy, he is the author of several books, including Theatre and the World, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Terror and Performance, Rajasthan: An Oral History, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic through Photography, Performance and Public Culture.

A former advisor of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Bharucha has conducted workshops in India, the Philippines, South Africa, and Brazil on decolonial issues relating to land and memory, the politics of touch, and social transformation.