Field Notes: Towards Ecological Knowing

Field Notes is an annual conference developed in conjunction with MAP’s ongoing permanent exhibition Beneath the Turning Sky. Featuring artworks across a range of media, the exhibition explores how we find our place in this vast, unfolding universe. How do our choices shape the world, our communities, and all others with whom we share the world? From creation myths to the technologies shaping our future, the exhibition traces our enduring search for meaning, and our attempts to understand the cosmos.

Field Notes is imagined as an annual gathering that unpacks, complicates, and responds to the ideas and themes presented in Beneath the Turning Sky through a South Asian lens. By bringing artists and cultural workers into conversation with practitioners from diverse disciplines (policy, advocacy, ecology, technology) and members of local communities, the conference aims to reimagine our relationship with the environment through creative, critical, and collaborative practices.

Taking the exhibition’s opening gesture of creation myths and cosmologies as a starting point, the first edition of the conference asks: What knowledge systems have humans built to understand the world we live in? Before we can act on the world, we must learn to read it again — but from whose maps and histories? How can artistic and community practices help us understand complex local ecologies?

This is a public conference. If you are interested in attending, register your interest through the link! The full schedule will follow soon.