Dilli ki Sardi (Winter of Delhi) depicts how practices of open burning and fuelwood gathering, which have long sustained the energy-needs of urban poor populations in Delhi, form a site of environmental contestation in a time where air pollution is identified as a major health hazard. 

Mulberry توت visually entraps the viewer and forces them to negotiate the ongoing military violence in Lebanon as an enduring, sensory, experience in which human connection with the environment becomes an act of resistance.

Ubiquitous Noise shifts the focus onto the material entanglements of sound, showing the lived realities of inhabiting an environment dominated by technology through a textural engagement.

Lastly, How it Begins renegotiates the relationship between people, fire, and landscape as one of care rather than destruction - making us rethink the way our culture has shaped how we interpret and associate certain practices and environmental events.

Plunging the viewers into the heavily charged layers of socio-ecological relationships, these films teach us to find the nuance that is so essential in today’s world. As we ceaselessly trudge along the remains of our unstable collective histories, how do we continue to live?

FILM BLOCK 2: BURROW post-screening discussion facilitated by…

Chitra Sangtani (she/her) is an anthropologist and visual artist, currently doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh where she is studying the everyday politics of fire and flammability in Delhi. Chitra is the director of Dilli ki Sardi (Winter in Delhi).

Tatyana Nieves Brown (she/her) is an artist, designer and visual anthropologist exploring materiality and political possibilities of everyday objects in Puerto Rico and occupied islands globally.

Susana Higueras (she/her) is a visual anthropologist doing multispecies ethnography in wastescapes in the Peruvian Andes, currently doing PhD at the Goldsmiths University.