Project Statement

This collaboration brings together Lagori Collective, a social design lab and member-run community space based in India, and my own practice rooted in Latin America. Working across South Asia and South America, we explore how our regions can share knowledge, creativity, and ways of imagining plural futures.

Our partnership grows out of shared commitments:

• Orality as knowledge — honoring songs, chants, and stories as carriers of ecological memory and cultural wisdom across generations.
• Relationality & reciprocity — understanding that humans, nature, and spiritual beings are interdependent.
• Community well-being and ecological balance — centering communal flourishing over extractive or individual gain.
• Pluriversality — recognizing that many worlds, beings, and ways of knowing coexist in harmony.

Both South Asia and South America hold deep cultural richness and ecological diversity while facing shared challenges: rural–urban divides, colonial legacies, and tensions between tradition and modernization.

We are beginning this work through cross-regional workshops, bringing participants from both regions into shared spaces of listening, storytelling, and speculative design.

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Projects details

River Is a Relative is the first project emerging from our South–South collaboration. Designed as a 2-hour online workshop, it brings together participants from South Asia and South America to reimagine our relationships with freshwater—beyond utility, beyond extraction, and back into kinship.

Across both regions, life has long been shaped by powerful river systems: the Ganges, Indus, Amazon, Orinoco, and countless smaller waters that sustain worlds. Yet in today’s urban landscapes, our ties to these waters have become distant and fractured. Aquifers dry, rivers are diverted, and ancestral water knowledge erodes. This workshop asks:

• What might it mean to remember water as relative, not resource?
• What new rituals of care and reciprocity can we imagine for the futures we long for?

Participants co-create speculative freshwater rituals, drawing on:

• Everyday ritual as care — expanding rituality beyond religion or tradition into practices of connection, gratitude, and renewal.
• Freshwater as more-than-human kin — acknowledging rivers and aquifers as beings with memory, voice, and personhood.
• Orality as knowledge — using song, chant, and spoken word to shape meaning, inspired by the oral traditions that carry ecological wisdom across generations in both regions.

Through storytelling, collaborative worldbuilding, and multisensory exploration, the workshop opens space to repair relationships with water and imagine interdependent, pluriversal futures rooted in the Global South

This workshop marks the beginning of a larger practice of building South–South imaginaries—grounded in rivers, reciprocity, and multispecies care.