Let me come to your Wounds, Heal Myself 
Art and agriculture - an Aesthetic of  Regeneration
a cross-disciplinary art project with the farmers collective FTAK
Kelakam – Kerala.  January 16 – 20, 2020 
Collaborating artists: Azis T.M. - visual artist, V.T. Jayadevan - poet, Sivadas Poilkavu - theatre artist, M.P. Pratheesh - poet, C.F.John - artist- curator
This is an attempt for our thoughts and anguish, and the making of Arts, to serve Life that is rooted in the Soil and community. We believe that only what finds its bodily presence can breathe Life. And it is time to denounce the abstract and the floating, and start seeing, touching, nurturing and finding joy within the real. Our thoughts should become flesh once again. Through this project we do not create objects of Art but rather open spaces in which things can happen. It is a collective space fostering an act of regeneration and to sprout from the roots and trunk that are chopped from time to time. 
The exhibits and the spaces of happening are presented in one and a half acres of land graced by the seeds of sustenance preserved and nurtured by over 70 collectives. FTAK has been fostering them since 2005 as a sacred duty, keeping a covenant between the Seeds and us. ‘Let me come to your wounds, heal myself’ is an invitation to come home to our own senses and to claim ourselves: our body, our land, and our bodily connections.
Art and Agency
If anyone went to view the Seed fest the way we visit other shows, would miss the meaning. The seeds with extraordinary diversity: ordinary, unique, nearly extinct, all make a testimony. What we get to see in the stalls are not just seeds but also the spirit of the dedicated collectives. The seeds reflects their labor of love and trust. They wow to stay with the seeds, to take forward its dream to stay alive.  All who come to the seed festival are part of one caring. They bare the spirit of the seed and the soil. Only one who is connected with the soil can understand the dream of a seed.  A secret that can pass only through the hands that touch the soil. 
So also the meaning of the art event “Let me come to your Wounds, Heal myself”. It can permeate only through the inner thoughts of the ones who are connected with the soil. Otherwise it will stay hidden. Its meaning come in conflict with today's spoken culture, that has often has no connection with a land, it is global. The art of global culture are rather like some modern airport or shopping mall – a place that is like every other place. An abstraction. They are really nowhere, and no-thing. They tend to separate the human community and cultural forms from the life springs of soil / nature. 
At a time when our tastes today, without even our own knowing, are defined by agencies funded by the State or Corporate institutions, here the agency and principal are aligned to one vision.  The interest of the artist and the art and the farmer became the same, so one agency, one entity. It was the whispering of the farmers that revealed through the art event.  
Hence the event was done without Patrons of any kind, Event Managers, PR agencies and the Media. It was not an exhibition for an alienated consumption. The light of it stays within a vision that survives beyond the financially-driven economy but participating in a social economy. It was a humble effort to see the lights of the palms that hold soil and seed. 
What the farmers who lead a life freed from deco and luxury but holds just the know-how of sustenance and a sense of beauty rooted in the same have to tell our nation. For us the people who have developed a taste for studio aesthetics, corporate funded exhibitions and other entertainments, entering the beauty of seed and soil may become a journey of pilgrimage.
'Agriculture simultaneously holds both political and spiritual meanings of seeds and soil. A walk through the soil is walk into a different light and bodily relations. As of a spiritual act, separating seeds, keeping, caring, planting and exchanging, the hands feet eyes and heart of a farmer overcome darkness. With the sacred act of placing the seeds into the soil, farm lands are silent prayers'. (Vithumooda M.P Pratheesh , Abdullakutty Edavanna, Elements)
Please view all projects in Culture/ Agriculture to know more about the exhibits. 
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