The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer¹

The glittering and celestial story of the Skywoman, shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes of North America, is a creation tale of a pregnant Skywoman who fell to earth through a hole left by an uprooted tree. Supported by birds, she landed on a great turtle’s back where animals retrieved material to create land that grew as she danced. The alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude formed Turtle Island. Wild grasses, flowers, trees and medicines spread everywhere. The story of the Skywoman’s journey holds not only relationships but clues as to how we can go forward. She directs us towards a constellation of care and teachings that are not instructions but rather like a compass as they provide an orientation. For Robin Wall Kimmerer, Skywoman ‘…was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers’.

Indigenous Ethnobotanist Enrique Salmon uses the phrase kincentric ecology as a way of understanding kinship as the intertwining of the social, mythological and practical way that ‘life in any environment is viable only when humans view their surroundings as kin; that their mutual roles are essential for their survival.’² Landscapes including rocks, rivers, oceans, geographical features, lakes and shorelines provide a shared sense of place and require human care and respect. Humans become relational participants in local habitats as part of an extended ecological family. Within this framework, I have been researching wetlands as a living ecosystem: an intertidal confluence of land and sea where a balanced biodiversity can flourish.

With colleagues at Shiv Nadar University in New Delhi, the shared project, Aikyam|Togetherness is derived from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘unity’ whereas ‘doab’ is ‘two bodies of water’ in Persian.³ We are researching the wetlands habitat of Upper Doab, where two rivers (the Ganga and the Yamuna) converge on the outskirts of New Delhi. Together we record the mutable aurality of the wetlands, photograph waterbodies and villagers, as well as conduct interviews with local residents. Through this process we are documenting, listening, learning and thinking with place. Within this research terrain, artist and researcher, Kuldeep Patil has captured the biodiversity through annotated photographs taken during the monsoon of fall 2025.⁴ Works such as Asha’s Haveli and The Canal at Khatana show an abandoned home with columns and scalloped arches contrasted with an opaque water body enveloped by vegetation and an industrial tower in the background.

Our methodology takes a multi-species ethnographic approach to understand how humans and non-humans live in a relational ecology in the wetlands. Highlighting multisensorial multimodal forms of engagement alongside textual analysis, this project uses artistic practices to decentre the research perspective from a human language and rationality-based cognitive approach, to a more experiential and sensorial one from the Global South.

What can the seasonal patterns of the wetlands—monsoons, floods, flow and heat—teach us about kinship between humans and water, cultural traditions and livelihoods? How can we hear the bird song? What can the wetlands teach us about the entanglement between water bodies, species and humans? How can interdependency be understood at the heart of creative relations: to artists, each other, community, artworks and audiences within a fragile ecosystem? How can ancestral and Indigenous practices shape our understanding of each other and our habitat?

Wetlands can be considered as a unique biome that allows for a capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings and consider a multispecies assembly between humans and non-humans. Many more than human beings have interests and agency as part of a web of relations.⁵ Within the seasonality, soundscores and wetlands habitat, we can imagine and coexist in a relational ecology. Wetlands teach us about fragility, song and survival, encouraging us to listen to multispecies and amplify its clarion call. Below are a series of edited conversations with three artists—Katarina Pirrak Sikku, Janelle Evans and KR Sunil—about wetlands where memory maps, silent forests, campfires of joy, storytelling and survival flourish in the wetlands.

KATARINA PIRAK SIKKU, Sámi Swedish artist and researcher

In 2004, a friend of mine told me about my mother’s cousin’s testimony at a court hearing. The reindeer herders were sued by the landowners at the coast area in Sweden, in the area where the herders had their reindeers during the winter. My mother’s cousin said his mother was born in the area, but he was asked if he could prove it. How could he show any evidence? She was born in the winter and during the winter the traces you leave in the snow melt away. I got upset. I was still studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. I started to draw maps on the floor at exhibition halls. After the exhibitions they are cleaned away. You don’t see them anymore but, in the space, they are still there. Someone can tell you about them. Is it possible to erase our traces?  In a way my maps that I have drawn are a continuation of the maps I did in the exhibition halls. 

Stories

I do the maps because I need to document my stories. These are stories my parents told me and are drawn from my own experience of the area. The map that I did from my mother’s childhood area contains less stories and it depends on my grandparents who moved there. It was a new place for them also. They rented a house from the forest company where my grandpa worked. The map from my father’s area is more complex, the families have lived there for many generations. My father's area is an old place. I was walking there this autumn with an archaeologist and she read the area in a different way than I do. She had promised not to take any samples from the area so we won’t know how old the fireplaces are. Close to my father´s parental home there is a sacred lake. In the maps I have written my memories of the stories that I have heard but I have also written about my own memories from the places. I have realised I am a link in a chain and I am also part of a history. 

Maps

I have done a map for the Lule River. A big one. The river is like a massive wound. I have grown up next to the river and I am the last generation who has seen the Kaitum fall alive before the Vattenfall, the power plant company owned by the Swedish State who built a hydro power plant station there. I was talking with a young man who has also grown up in this area, I said, ‘it is so sad’ and he answered me, ‘I don’t know, this is the only place I know. I have never known elsewhere’. The landscape has always looked like it is now. He has no reference so he can’t compare. The ice is dangerous and he has learned that. And that’s true. The water comes from the mountain area, there Vattenfall has built huge water reservoirs to collect water to use during the winter when we need more electricity. The biggest water reservoir is Suorva: the dam with the largest impounded water volume, with six billion cubic meters of water. To talk about the river is complex. It is so much, the loss of the land, the people who worked there, the small cities that were built for the company that are gone now, the empty houses but I think the biggest is the sorrow after the river. Sometimes when the reservoir for the closest power plant station is full, the company needs to open the dam gates and we can hear the sound of the water and the fall. It is powerful. I wonder how the animals handled the change when the river was dammed. And also the people who were used to the sound of the water. What happened with them and their memories? And how did the employee feel when they built the dams? They must have noticed the loss of the water sound and they knew it was forever. When the river was dammed, we were supposed to be proud, we contributed to the Swedish welfare. Could we grieve the river? 

I remember all the resistance against the plans for building more hydro power plants. No one listened to the people. And today we are standing here with a river that doesn’t exist anymore. The water is in a prison, not able to live as it lived before. Do we need to find another word for the river? It is not a river anymore. It is an industrial area. 

Wetland

We don’t really use the word wetland. I have asked my husband and he says in Sámi language there is not really a word for wetland. For example, the word for a mire is the same as for the ocean. They are the same. Maybe it has something to do with the open landscape. Last year I listened to recordings of my father. The interviewer asked about a word, galna, in Sámi, the simple meaning is hard and is used for wood from dead trees in the forrest. The wood is dry and has hardened during the drying process. But it has another meaning, galna ilmme, it is an autumn winter day, it is sunny, cold outside, not much snow, just a little bit, the mire has started to freeze, the trees have lost their leaves, the sound is heard from a long distance. The same is with the áhpe, the meaning could possibly translate to wetland or a big mire and ocean. 

Marks

About the marks. My curiosity started when I searched for my maternal grandfather’s mark. I didn’t find his mark but I found his families' and his grandparents families' marks. I also found my maternal grandmother's families' and her grandparents' marks. I saw it is a visual grammatical system that I don’t understand. I went to the archive. In 1886 there was a law that obliged all reindeer herders to register their marks. During the winter market in Jokkmokk there were more than 1000 marks that were registered that year. And they are registered in the judge book. In the judge book the words are important, the written language is so visible but when they started with the reindeer marks they had to draw. In Swedish there are no words for the different cuts in the ear. But in Sámi language you can describe much with a few words. Still today the reindeer marks are difficult to describe in Swedish. The marks are so independent.

Silent forest

Yesterday I went to the jewellery store here in Jokkmokk. A man came and we started to talk. He had been involved in a project when they tried to introduce the eagle owl again to this area. In the project they replaced 48 eagle owls. None are left or maybe two are still in the area. The problem is there are no voles and mountain lemmings. We started to talk about how silent the forest is today compared to when we were young. How fast it has happened. I think we have a personal responsibility to protect our planet. How we travel, how we consume, how we behave towards nature. I believe in ourselves, we are capable of changing this but we need to be aware.

KR SUNIL, Indian documentary photographer, artist and writer from Kerala

Coastal

I've grown up in a coastal town, and so I've been intuitively observing the evident changes that have been shaping these regions over the decades. When I travel, I realise that it's the same throughout the vast coastal expanse of Kerala. So when I work on my art, traversing through these lands—and these changes—is inevitable. It naturally reflects in my work—the vulnerability of lives, the ecological precarity and the uncertainty that is looming. The zone is often considered a border between land and water, but to me the immense amount of lives in the zone are amazingly overlooked by the world. I want my images to show that we are all interconnected and dependent on this narrow, fragile strip of land. By valuing all sentient beings—from the smallest crab to the oldest fisherman—I am making a statement: their vulnerability is our own, and their resilience deserves to be seen and respected.  

Survival

Storytelling takes a multitude of dimensions in this work. To begin with, these are artists who narrate stories onstage. They tell glorious Portuguese and other European stories while performing, stamping (literally too) with authority and confidence on these tales from unseen lands. Moving on, their life itself is a story in my photographs—the living contradictions depicted. Further, these moments capture layers of other storytelling elements that may not be evident, but are surely and significantly part of the narrative—like colonisation, survival, marginalisation, rebellion and resilience, caste, etc. So for me the storytelling is taking place via many parallels, each with its own centre of gravity and relevance. 

Seasons

To begin with, the most crucial point is that the seasonal patterns have become erratic for these communities lately. They have been enduring the overwhelming wrath of nature for decades, and now it has gotten even worse in terms of frequency or as you mention—'patterns'. The kinship is undoubtedly significant, but for this particular work, it is also ironic. These communities revere the sea—they depend on it for livelihood, they respect it for its nature, it's even part of their everyday lingual. The sentiment is emphatically different from the 'beach-going' public; the seashore community treats the sea with utmost regard. Yet, it is their lives that are dramatically affected by the same sea. Their homes, livelihoods and culture are tossed and overridden at unexpected hours—despite anticipation! So this relationship is more of an irony for me, above all.

Performing

These performers are from the most marginalised segment of society, and this is surprisingly adjacent to the urban rise of Kochi. They are dark-skinned, extremely fit and healthy, and poverty-ridden—a combination of traits that are not ever projected to the world. But when they adorn their performing attire and enter the stage, they shout out their presence in this world, like it's their only way to do it. They are immensely proud of their artform and the royal narratives they enact. It's like an escape from their dire straits in life, but they do it with vigour. For me, my works often tend to feature such communities, who are marginalised or/and forgotten. It's not a choice, but rather the untold nature of their unbelievable stories that entice me. More often than not, it paves way for political commentary too, which eventually drives me further. For me, while the eminent are easily and comprehensively documented beyond need, the lives of these people are never accounted for, until they disappear without a trace. 

Staging

I've staged this series. I had first met these artists in my hometown, when they were performing Chavittunadakam. But when I befriended them and then visited their homes, the stark contrast hit me square. Their flamboyant outlooks onstage were exactly contradicting the conditions they lived in—their dilapidated homes frequented by rising tides. I felt their stories needed more than documentation, that the stories have to be seen and heard—and thought about. Hence I staged these contradictions, where they stand in their royal attire, with a backdrop of their deplorable homes and amidst visiting tides.

JANELLE EVANS, Dharug artist, filmmaker, writer and researcher 

Wetlands as intertidal zones where saltwater and freshwater meet are significant places for Indigenous peoples of Australia. Not only are they important for biodiversity they are significant spaces for transcultural collaboration and communication. It is in these intertidal zones that shared responsibility for land care, water care and species care take place under both lore and law. As meeting places, they are also significant for bringing people together in a spirit of togetherness to sort out differences. 

Walking

Walking and mapping the wetlands and other areas of my ancestral Dharug lands allows me to explore the imposition of British colonisation and to record the impact. I record traces of the cultural spaces that exist between the past and the present. Walking as an artistic practice allows me to map features of the spaces of the landscape along with the visual cues from the experience of walking, e.g. the water, reeds, rocks, grasses that make up the wetlands of the Sydney Basin. I collect materials from my walking and mapping journeys and make ink from them. Working with this ink and the materials I gather on my walks has become an integral part of my artistic practice as a methodology for mark-marking to record the memory of being on Country. 

During the Covid lockdown, when it wasn't permitted to move outside of a limited radius, my art practice shifted to painting from memory or recollection, my experiences of walking through Country. 

Kinship

I can best discuss what the seasonal patterns of the wetlands teach us about kinship between water bodies, species and humans by relating experiences with my father, which were later confirmed and expanded on by Uncle Steve Russell (son of Aunty Esme Timbery) La Perouse. 

My father used to take me fishing when I was about three years old. We would go out in a little dinghy in the estuaries of the Johnstone River in Far North Queensland (where we were living at the time) to catch mullet and other fish. There were seasonal times when we were permitted to do this. One time I caught an eel which my father forced me to throw back as this wasn't permitted for us to eat as Dharug people. My father taught me about seasonal fishing. The blooming of the Sydney Golden Wattle indicated that this was the right time to fish for sea mullet in the Sydney estuaries. This was a community event for peoples of the Sydney Basin region with men, women and children each playing a role. For Dharug and Gadigal people, the landscape of the Sydney Basin is not only a familiar terrain, but one that requires continuous acts of care-taking, maintenance and rejuvenation. Relationship to country, the ancestors, the Spirit/Creator realm is enacted within traditional law and lore through performative ceremonies which include song, dance and inscription on the body and land.

Birdsong

Sadly, in the Sydney Basin region damage to the wetlands has adversely affected the habitat of many native species including birds. Reintroducing Indigenous land practices in the wetlands, the heart of the Country, will help to create healthier waterways, food sources and biodiversity. The birds will sing again and in greater numbers when the Australian populace recognises that Indigenous situated and cultural knowledges of caring for water bodies, humans and non-human species creates a healthy and biodiverse Country.