Artists’ body to organise ‘staged hearing’ on stubble burning issue in Chandigarh

The project foregrounds the Rights of Nature as an expansion of the Right to Life enshrined under Article 21 of the Constitution. Following an earlier project staged as a Commission of Inquiry under the Commission of Inquiry Act 1952 and titled ‘Landscape As Evidence: Artist As Witness’, the current project in Chandigarh employs the format of the NGT in a bid to explore the principles of natural justice in the context of environmental justice.

The fictional case filed by Khoj and Chaudhari indicts the Union of India through the Ministry of Environment, the respective state stakeholders and a fictitious farmers’ union for their inability to stop stubble burning in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi.

The hearing includes three practising lawyers, three subject expert witnesses, three retired judges and three artists. It will follow the protocols, procedures and laws of the NGT and will be grounded in current environmental laws in India. The final judgment will be delivered at the end of the hearing. The project interrogates the role art can play as a means of knowledge production in the context of ecological interrelations.

Pooja Sood, Director of Khoj, an autonomous not-for-profit contemporary arts organisation that supports emerging and transdisciplinary creative practices, says that through this project they wish to initiate a discussion among stakeholders. “This includes the agrarian community, policy-makers, activists and the youth. The idea is to involve the larger community and the public to think of sustainable solutions to address challenges in the agrarian system,” she explains.

Adding that climate change is now a reality and needs immediate attention, they chose to do the staged hearing in Chandigarh.

Based in Delhi, since 2015 Chaudhari has been exploring the role of performance in law. “Khoj and I have worked on staged hearings before, so in 2017 they invited me to work on a project with them that looked at law, performance and ecology… The project deliberates on the rights of nature and what it actually means,” she said.

“I think the idea is how does one insert rights of nature into Article 21 which is the Right to Life and I think this is key because, at the moment, life in Article 21 only means human life. And so we are asking to expand into the non-human, for an ecosystem that comprises plants, insects, animals… Through the project, we hope to involve the larger public to critically think about the interrelationships and deep connections between humans and nature are large,” Chaudhari reflected.

The performance, in association with Elsewhere, will be held on Sunday, March 5, at the Open Hand Monument in Chandigarh from 6 pm to 9 pm. It will be a multilingual presentation (Hindi, Punjabi and English). The event is free and open to the public.