Wildbiyoo

Wildbiyoo updated their website address.

🌳. . Its becoming more and more painfully clear that we need to drastically re-think our relationship with the world around us, as climate change shows its face daily with environmental and socio-political disasters across the globe.
🌏. . This WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY falls amid a time of intense chaos and is a powerful reminder for all of us to get informed and speak up against injustice across the board.
What world do we want our children to grow up in and what can we do about it?
🌿. . Back in January we were moved by posters made by local school children in Canacona at the Community Awareness day for Climate Change we hosted with Goenkar NGO, stressing the need to protect and respect our forests and incredible and diverse ecosystems, for their future.
🎨. . Which of these beautiful and thoughtful works of art speak to you most?!

(We are turning these posters into road signs in the Cancon region as a reminder to all who live or pass through :) Look out for them!)

⛳️ If there's one lesson that this pandemic has driven home, it is that each of us has the capacity to make a huge difference with what we choose to do or not do. The values that people lived by even before this crisis seem to have determined their ability to respond to the needs (directly or indirectly influenced by Covid-19) of people beyond their immediate circle of friends and family.

Since last year, we've been speaking to several amazing , whose work in nurturing and restoring the health of our planet has inspired us to share their stories, in the form of interviews and panel discussions. They continue to lead by example while the world is in lockdown.

👏 Puja Mitra of Terra Conscious and Gabriella D'cruz of Sensible.Earth, have been volunteering for the Goa Humanitarian Helpline, a citizen-led initiative which has been attending to distress calls and installing efficient, community-driven supply chains of essentials to the most vulnerable families in Goa.

👏 Meanwhile, Divya from MyNadi has kept her hands busy making masks from her fabric leftover from her clothes line. She's donated these to Give For Goa

👏 And lastly, Nandini Velho is one of the wildlife conservationists fiercely campaigning for the protection of the incredibly biodiverse Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh from the destructive Etalin Hydro Electric Project. The project threatens to kill at least 270,000 trees, destroying wildlife habitat and the community managed lands of the indigenous Idu Mishmi community (head to Sanctuary Asia to learn more about this campaign!)

We are humbled and in awe of their giving spirit and their commitment to serving the communities they live and work in. They are showing us, through example, that the hard but rewarding work of building a more just world for all life begins with a localized, specific love for a place and those that live there.

🙏

📸 Tim Marshall

👁 While the pandemic has closed several doors, a few little ones have opened. For the lucky few, this has been a period of recharging, resting or creating.

A time for reflection, for a joyful discovery of the mundane, a daily counting of simple blessings. An opportunity to pay tribute to work of the unlucky many, called to carry more than their fair share of burden. A time to sow the seeds that have been piling up in the corner, to press flowers into the books we finally got around to reading, to finally initiate yourself to the difference between a latte and cappuccino and other tantalising mysteries ☕️

How have you kept yourself sane and sound?

💐 The first of May is usually a holiday for workers around the world, but this year, things are different. Thousands of healthcare workers, grocery store staff, pharmacists, and municipal workers cannot take a day off because they are holding the fabric of society together, even as it rips apart. Labor unions cannot organize strikes because of social distancing protocols. And for many, a day off would seem like a cruel joke, given they are out of work.

So, although today looks radically unlike any other May Day, it might be one of the most crucial ones we've had in recent history. Today is a good day to ask ourselves what we want work to look like, what kind of work spaces and work cultures we aspire to. Should we have shorter work weeks? Do we want essential workers to be paid well for the incredibly tough work they do? Do we think people should work themselves to the bone just to make enough to survive?

🎯 The more we realize that all our struggles for justice converge in every way, the more our questions will expand. We can then ask things like: when we transition to a more regenerative economy, to cleaner energy, will we make sure this transition can lead to jobs for the miners and loggers? Can we imagine a world where the currently invisible labor of child-rearing, housekeeping and care giving is valued as an essential service? Will doing that, lead to this kind of labor being more equally distributed? Can the labor of healing - ourselves and the planet - become an essential service from now on?

As we face an uncertain future, it helps to remember that May Day is also an ancient Spring celebration, celebrating the abundance of life with flowers, feasting, revelry, and loving indulgently. It is about honoring both the masculine and feminine, as necessary parts of being. Perhaps the overlap of these two powerful events suggests to us a way of living in the future that honors all that is truly valuable to all of life.🍀

📸 Annie Spratt, Charles Deluvio, Jeremy Stenuit, Luke Jones (in order)

❓ Where do we go from here? ❓

Hard to find stillness amidst the cacophony of more or less founded assumptions on who’s to blame for the pickle we’re in. Harder still to make sense of the future when uncertainty reigns and once again, we fall prey to a rhetoric of fear: violence and fanaticism, shock doctrines and aggressive nationalism, financial mayhem and symptomatic denial that’s our system too is sick…

🦋 Whilst the world goes mad trying to save a system in shambles, perhaps it’s finally time to acknowledge that we are part of a wide web of interdependencies. We’ve become so caught up in chopping down forests to feed our ginormous population that we’ve forgotten that nature abhors imbalance. What nourishes our ravenous appetite for cheap meat and high tech starves the fragile ecosystems we depend on in the first place. Sooner or later, what sustains our rampant development comes to fuel the explosion of wildfires and zoonotic diseases, sparked by the destruction of natural habitats a hundred thousand kilometres away.

Now that we’ve witnessed the interconnectedness 🕸 of human systems as well as all living systems, how can we go back to “normal”? How can we adapt our models to protect and regenerate nature, not just exploit it? ��

👣 Where do we go from here?

It's not a rhetoric question — it’s a deep interrogation that calls for a global rethinking of what world we want to live in. They say "never let a good crisis go to waste": now is a time to reinvent the paradigms we live by. No one has the answers; each one of us is qualified and encouraged to contribute to one of the greatest discussions in human history. We’d love to open the debate to you, our Wildbiyoo community. Please comment on this post with ideas, suggestions, questions and we’ll happily throw ourselves into this collective act of imagination with you. 🙏

Be safe, be strong,

Love, Wildbiyoo team

📸 Mohammed Salik Photography

💏 To all the lovely humans from all around the world who came and supported us at Wildbiyoo Eco-Festival, we hope you are safe and healthy wherever you are. We’re learning more and more everyday about the might of communities and how important it is to have each other’s backs through this crazy period.
🤜🏽🤛🏼
Now more than ever, we need to think deeply about our relationship to the earth, evaluate our role in the ecosystem and zoom out a little to realise that we are all living-breathing-eating creatures on a tiny ball of life-giving dirt, moving through space and time. 🌏 We need to look beyond our paltry differences of faith, race and belief and see how we, as a species, can nurture each other and safeguard the only home we have ever known!
Much love and light to all the wildlings out there, may you emerge with strength and wisdom from this period of hardship 🌱’
📸 Mohammed Salik Photography

🌱 Our financial report is out! 🌱

Immense and neverending love for all the residents, volunteers, helpers, musicians and festival goers who made our fundraiser possible 🙏🏼 Our fledgling attempt to achieve our Big Wild Dream was met with many challenges. Spread thin to bring to life a residency and ambitious festival, added to a late shift in venue and a full stack of unexpected overhead costs, we were genuinely expecting our accounts would end up in the red!

And yet...😇

Not only did we manage to miraculously avoid that but we also were able to raise a modest sum for Arannya Environment Research Organisation. It's a lot less than we projected — only 10,000 Rps — but hopefully enough to support some of Arannya ERO's inspiring work. The challenge is on for the next Wildbiyoo edition, and we have a feeling it will sparkle and fly ✨

We've published a full report on our financials on our website. Have a look and feel free to share the love and send us any tips and tricks on cutting expenses and fundraising more for our partners in sustainability. We’d be more than happy to hear from you! 🥰

>> FINANCIAL REPORT: https://www.wildbiyoo.com/festival-2020 (scroll down to the 'Reports' section)

📸 Mohammed Salik Photography

🙌 Our waste report is out! 🙌

We’ve been throwing around the word zero-waste quite a lot, but what does it mean exactly? Admittedly, achieving 0kgs of waste is virtually impossible given that even organic waste is, well…waste.

♻️ We favour a more pragmatic definition of zero waste: diverting as close to 100% waste as possible from the landfill.

We pledged full transparency, here it is: over the course of Wildbiyoo festival, we managed to divert... *drum roll* 98% waste from the landfill!!! 🥳

To be exact, our festival waste totalled at:
>> 79% Biodegradable
>> 19% Recyclable
>> 2% Non-recyclable

How did we manage? Definitely not alone! It took an entire community to make it happen: from V-Recycle who took care of our whole waste management setup, to Eco World Goa who sponsored all our biodegradable tableware; from all of you who left your plastic bottles and plastic-wrapped snacks at home, to our inspiring vendors and food stalls that took on the challenge of reinventing their packaging and bags to make Wildbiyoo a fully Zero-Waste experience.

🙏

THANK YOU for making it possible, it’s a dream come true. We’ve published the full waste report on our website, we’d love you to delve into the (not so) dirty details > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/festival-2020 (scroll down to the 'Reports' section)

And please let us know in a comment how we can do even better next time !

Lots of love, stay safe and

📸 Saskia Hadley, Shreya Basu, Mohammed Salik Photography

As the pandemic continues to dismantle the world as we know it, we’ve been scattered and slowed down too! However, we’re in the final rounds of curating the reports we've been putting together: waste generated during the eco-festival, full financial breakdowns of the residency and festival, final fundraiser announcements and complete portfolios of the work produced by our amazing artists in residence!

Given what the last few weeks have brought upon us, Wildbiyoo residency and festival both feel like a distant dream! However, we've been working hard to fulfill our pledge of full financial transparency. Hold tight as we put finishing touches on our big announcements!

🌱

🦠 COVID-19 UPDATE

Goa has been in lockdown mode since March 24th, a situation that is likely to continue until the end of April. Although only 7 cases have officially been announced, there are most probably hundreds more that have gone undetected.

With the government's mixed messages regarding the possibility for essential services like pharmacies and grocery stores to stay open, Goa's first week of lockdown has been one of high stress and confusion. For several long days, locals and tourists alike were unable to access consistent food supplies. The situation that has triggered strong criticism of elected leaders for failing to communicate clearly or implement a strong plan of action. Goa's economy, hugely dependent on tourism, is likely to take a considerable hit this year, even after emergency measures to combat the pandemic are lifted.

Ironically, the crisis has not just cleared our skies and streams: it seems like it is starting to lift the smog clouding our perception, revealing the reality of who to count on when hell breaks loose. For every story telling the cruelty of police or landowners towards migrant workers or stranded tourists, there have been many more covering the community initiatives offering shelter, food and support to hundreds of people in need.

True leaders stand out in times of crisis and drastic change.

We hope this crisis brings as much clarity and care as it does losses, in Goa and around the world. Upheaval, as difficult as it may be, holds the creative potential to usher us into a world more united, more resilient and more loving. In its undoing of the familiar, coronavirus offers us the chance to build a bright new world.

Residency Retrospective #14: "Free Pass: Live Music in Goa", by Carolijn Terwindt, Nirmika Athalye & Jayraj Patil

5mins

While foreign and Indian tourists visit Goa's beaches and nightlife, others clean the accumulating garbage and sell the fish that was caught in the sea.

Due to its proximity to the ocean, Goa is highly prone to disasters caused by climate change.
While the lifestyles of most tourists is accelerating this crisis, fishermen and marginalized locals are particularly vulnerable to floods or changes in the biodiversity.

🐢

This artistic project explores the radically different worlds of Goa that the tourists and those that work "behind the scenes" to make tourism possible, inhabit. Our lives are so connected, but the connection is all too often invisible. How can contact be made and a conversation be initiated?

As can be experienced in any of the live jams characterizing Goa's beaches, music is a universal practice that can create joy and community. But which communities are part of the live jams on the beach and which are not?

This 5 minute video traces an intervention that interrogates a highly unequal status quo. The results are sometimes awkward, sometimes heartwarming

For more on Nirmika, Jayraj's art, head to Wildbiyoo website at www.wildbiyoo.com/nirmika-athalye-jayraj-patil

Residency Retrospective #12: 'Survivors of the Sixth Extinction' by Becky Lyon

Becky: "I was drawn to the epiphytes, an extraordinary type of species abundant in the jungle that grow directly and non-parasitically onto other species. They draw their nutrients from the air, rain, water and debris around it and not the soil. As I learned more about the environmental threats in the region, from nutrient depletion in the soil to record high temperatures, I started to think about how these hardy species, through their novel partnerships, stand a strong chance of survival.

I was struck by Chris D. Thomas’ concept of the "Sixth Mass Genesis" (in which every extinction also prompts a flourishing of biodiversity), to imagine the type of epiphytes that might emerge in the future. I learned that the Strangler Fig makes the host plant moist and cool (and have already survived the fifth mass extinction intact); fungi decomposes chemicals that have leached into the ground, orchids generate energy from their host.

I created a series of imaginary hybrids grown from trees that represent clusters of kinship between flora and fungi in a denatured environment. The sculptures were crafted from the native clay, painted in black herbal dye, and enhanced with natural metallic pigment powder, that speaks to both a preciousness and an inherent magic in the organisms."

🍄🧙‍♂️

Read more about Becky's work on Wildbiyoo website >> https://www.wildbiyoo.com/becky-lyon

Residency Retrospective #11: Humsadakchhap - a public intervention project; a quiet disruption. A seed sowing revolution by Abhijit Patil (Abhijit Aruna Vilas)

"To participate:
All you need to do is sow an indigenous seed. Alone or with your community - with friends, stranger, lovers. Indigenous or naturalized seeds to where you are. Ask about them. Find them. Share. And try not to sow the same kind twice. Diversify. You can choose to be a part of the seeds' journey towards becoming a tree, but sowing love is the most important part of participation.

Where?
Literally any place that works. Public or private, urban or rural, wherever the seed can go.
Most importantly, in your hearts."

Humsadakchhap project
"Claiming public spaces for self sufficiency and sustainability with action-based local knowledge can be the key to real social, economic and environmental transformations. But this is rarely a part of the mainstream political discourses, as it lacks the aggression that the violent system demands. Is public space really 'our' space? If it is, can we treat it as ours? If we can claim it to destruct, harass or kill, can we not claim it to sow seeds? Knowledge and conservation of seeds is an act of regaining control over public spaces, discourses, and most importantly, over our lives. Seeds are the most basic means of production that are available to everyone.
Rewilding through indigenous seeds can help address the current food, farming and climate crisis. [...] Seeds hold the potential to show us how to truly fix things. With time, care and sharing."

>> Read more about Abhijit's art-activism on Wildbiyoo website> https://www.wildbiyoo.com/abhijit-patil

Residency retrospective #10: Residency retrospective #9: Symbiotic~Beings by André Soares

[pause] Experience what emerges upon and with an open me (us). This artistic practice honors the wor(l)d ‘magic’ for kin~experiences — it is like a visceral blow to the whole body to be alive. It is a deeply relational opening to life. I notice the unnameable as a fertile field in which to engage with the invisible as visible. How do imaginations become matter? What is matter? What matters? What is wild, now? How to sustain experiences that resize one’s body [spirit] with an undeniable sense of beingness, unfolding provisory and endless processes that I claim as weather-beings?

Relationships as material: from fungi, mosses, plants, trees, decayed matter, animals, minerals, stones and humans, as well as human-made, connect now remembering ancient mutualism—a subset of symbiosis in which all organisms benefit from their relational~associations.
What if humans could also do a kind of photosynthesis? What if we could all breathe love as light? What if we awaken the senses to transform fear and conditioning into love and light?

Could we join the Wood Wide Web’s existence? Could we increase in understanding of its symbiosis—about where species begin and end; about whether humankind and jungle might be better imagined as a single superorganism, rather than a grouping of independent individualistic ones; and about what waste, trading, sharing, or even friendship might mean among all beings…

>> Read more about André's work on Wildbiyoo website > www.wildbiyoo.com/andre-soares

Residency retrospective #2: Saptamatrika - Pleiades - Seven; an ephemeral natural jewelry collection for the divine feminine, by Tereneh Mosley

🍃 Material: sustainable materials and methods (sustain + ability: sustain human innovation and beauty as well as nature's).
📿 Manner: considering a global perspective of culture, heritage, connection, history and the future of adornment of the human form - without damaging people, other animal's or the planet.
👘 Meaning: our will to adorn the body is human's original art form. Tereneh began IdiaDega - a global eco-design collaboration - to create a network of traditional and indigenous textile artists who work together to develop a new design language and fashion system.
🌼 Tereneh: "Stepping, crushing, crunching and missing masterpieces, that was what I thought as I walked around Agonda's jungle. It became an obsession. Instead of looking up through the majestic canopy, I kept looking down, on the ground for materials. Leaves, flowers, seeds, anything that could conceivably become a piece of jewelry. My Wildbiyoo artist residency application suggested that I would "make adornment out of jungle waste". Once I was here, I realized there was no such thing."
🍂 All the beadwork is in seven, or multiples of seven. The jewelry now "lives" mainly in these photographs, and the leaves, flowers, seeds, had been returned to the jungle Sunday evening of the festival.

>> Read more about Tereneh's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/tereneh-idia

Photos by: Mohammed Salik Photography, Saskia Hadley and Tereneh Mosley

Residency retrospective #9: "Trace - jungle" by Jingwen Li

>>Material: wood> Read more about Li's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/li-jingwen

📸 Saskia Hadley

Residency retrospective #8: "The Brightest Horizon" by Nebula Kollectiv

"The Brightest Horizon" was inspired by the Olive Ridley sea turtles nesting on Goa's beaches. After hatching, the turtle's instinct leads them towards the brightest horizon -- the sea, the stars, the moon. Nowadays the horizon has changed -- street lights, beach bars and traffic lead them astray. It is an allegory to human life in a capitalist society; temptations, depression and stress distract us from our paths.

🐢

This performance/sound piece is not only about the guilt and shame that comes with being human, but also our innocence.

Nebula is a collaboration between Johannes D'amico, a sound artist and sound designer, and Josefine Reich, an actress and performance artist. As a collective they explore themes that are generally censored by society, and aim to bring these closer to our minds through intimate storytelling with performance and soundscapes.

>> Read more about Nebula's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/nebula

📸 Saskia Hadley

Residency retrospective #7: "Earth Series: Untitled" by Leda Yang

Leda's practice revolves around the idea of drawing in attention through numerical and physical order, present in nature and across cultures.

During this residency, we've explored the various issues Goa is facing due to the progression of plastic consumption and its issues with segregation and organization. This prompted an exploration of attention to the individual components of our environment and the organization of these. This is an idea close to Leda's practice, which deals with the pace of daily life and how it impacts the way we treat material.

>> Read more about Leda's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/leda-yang

📸 Saskia Hadley

Residency retrospective #6: "Working notes from South Goa" by Katy Sayers Green

Katy is a Fine Artist from London. During the residency, she used eco-friendly materials such as Goan clay, natural dyes and ash from the fire pits -- all safe to the environment. Inspired by the surrounding Goan nature and the debris thrown up by the tide, Katy's work reflects imperfections (such as fishing nets on the sea shore) and alludes to a man-made crisis.

Her prevalent use of ashes on art material points to the destruction of our planet through global warming; however, hope is also present. Ash can, if used constructively, also fertilize and create new beginnings.

>> Read more about Katy's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/katy-sayers-green

📸 Mohammed Salik Photography

Residency retrospective #5: "A tale of Aloe Vera" by María Iragorri Amaya

María is focusing on finding a way of disrupting the skincare industry's current trend of constantly selling a detached, romanticised illusion of nature, instead of nurturing a relationship with the plants we consume in our skincare products. She wants to bridge the gap between the so-called "organic" and "sustainable" labels, by inviting people and skincare businesses to encourage customers to become experts and carers of the plants they use in their daily skincare routine.

María recognizes how her family upbringing in Columbia has defined a passion for nature. She is using this instinct to disrupt industries and bridge the gap between nature and consumers. First one up for grabs: the skin care industry!

>> Read more about María's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/maria-iragorri

📸 Shreya Basu

Residency retrospective #4: "A story shift" by Elena Etter

Elena: "I believe that language is at the core of what we do and who we are. We are at the mercy of ever-accumulating language, and it exerts an undeniable pull on the way we perceive, think, and create. "A story shift", my project at Wildbiyoo, explores what it means to be human through an investigation of words and stories. In times of change, how can we use stories to awaken people's minds to re-connect with our planet? In addition to it not being an easy story to tell, climate change hasn't necessarily proved to be a good story -- we fail, generally, to believe in it. Through my project I question how we should tell the story of the planetary crisis so that it is believable in the sense of narrowing the distance between awareness and feeling, in order to actually change our behavior and allow us to avoid extinction."

Painted in bold colors on materials found at Khaama Kethna, Elena's signs, appearing consistently across the festival grounds, powerfully weaved the theme of climate emergency through the scattered spaces. Encountering the words and the lettering in various corners drew you into a pause, offering the chance for moments of solitary appraisal during the otherwise vibrantly energetic weekend, of the shock and urgency of accepting the reality of what we've done to the planet.

>> Read more about Elena's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/elena-etter

📸 Mohammed Salik Photography & Shreya Basu

Residency retrospective #3: "When I landed here" by Jessica Wetherly (Jessica Raisin)

A London-based sculptor, Jessica's work navigates the blindness of an anthropocentric society where conflicts of natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, technology, machine, body, come into question.

"When I landed here" is a portable shelter made from single use plastic. This precious material is stitched into a makeshift tent that is being used as a greenhouse for growing polymers. The fragility of the structure and the naivety of the laboratory inside reflects the vulnerability of humanlike activity. Despite being surrounded by abundant life, the absent Martian is using its resources to make synthetic material.

🦠👽

The absurdity of this action in this questions our reality - our focus on survival through technology - which ignores the multiplicity of worlds around us.

>> Read more about Jessica's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/jessica-wetherly

📸: Saskia Hadley

Residency retrospective #1: "Us on the plate" by Ilaria Rosini

Ilaria: "I am a food explorer: I live to experience new tastes and new ways of consuming food, pulling us into an age of sensible and sustainable food systems."

🍲 Driven by the concern that we are rapidly losing our ancestral attachment to food, agriculture, and nature in general, and are increasingly making food choices driven by marketing myths, Ilaria is on a mission to bring us closer to the origin of our food.

🍅 At Wildbiyoo festival, Ilaria set up a simple experiment - the results of which will also inform part of her Master's thesis. Placing a blindfold on each visitor to her stall, she would feed them raw components of kichdi, a staple Indian dish she'd prepared earlier in the morning. Then, after they had gone through the entire set of ingredients, she let them try a spoonfull of the complete dish. It was such a curious thing to crunch on the grains of rice and lentils in their raw form!

🌾 With climate change threatening the survival of all species, food sustainability is pivotal if we are to preserve the planet for coming generations. Ilaria strongly believes that rekindling a more direct relationship with food, built around low-impact methods of food production, can be a powerful way to foster a more durable relationship with the natural world, while also protecting the legacy of traditional cultures and local communities.

>> Read more about Ilaria's work on Wildbiyoo website > https://www.wildbiyoo.com/ilaria-rosini

📸 Mohammed Salik Photography Abhijit A Samant