About
Shared Ecologies is a program by the Shyama Foundation supporting initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology – through critical, creative, aesthetic approaches, and collaborations with various disciplines and knowledge systems. Through grants, programmes, and conversations, we aim to facilitate a regional and international ecology of individuals, practitioners and institutions, who share overlapping concerns, philosophies and methodologies.
Premise
Art and Aesthetics are a powerful force of expression of the way the world is imagined and lived in. They can provide a critical path to examine current conceptual gridlocks, and suggest new ways of inhabiting our planet, which go beyond current trajectories and help reconfigure how we think about the world and live in it.
Vision
To help create an equitable and sustainable planet for the human and non-human world, through new critical, creative aesthetic approaches, and collaborations.
Mission
To promote the reconfiguration of the idea of nature as integral to human society for sustainable futures. To promote a diverse, just, heterogeneous, and inclusive ecology, led by the arts in collaboration with other disciplines and knowledge systems.
The Foundation will, through supporting cultural practices, act from a ground up perspective. It will act collaboratively with all such like-minded initiatives globally, but also specifically in this region. It will support those practitioners and practices which work singularly or collaboratively, to create an impact. Above all it will adhere to the values it reflects.
- Imagining and creating a sustainable planetary future, which involves all humans and non-human.
- Working towards an idea of ‘nature’ which integrates justice, equity and fairness in lieu of it being separate from human societies.
- To promote artistic practices which address the issues of ecology
- Pursue its goals both through established disciplinary practices of art, culture, history, science, traditional knowledge, humanities, politics, law etc. as well as those practices which lie outside such defined disciplines.
- To create new dialogues, partnerships, experiences, and forms with an emphasis on ground- up perspectives.
- To collaborate with like- minded initiatives, institutions, practices etc. around the world.
ADVISORS
Damian Christinger, Curator and Writer
Latika Gupta, Writer and Curator
Ranjit Hoskote, Writer and Poet
Smriti Rajgarhia, Director at Serendipity Arts
Vidya Shivadas, Curator and Director at FICA
Program Initiator
Ravi Agarwal