Native Tongues: Sensing our way into abundant futures

In this talk, artist and critical heritage researcher Kaajal Modi will discuss (and share elements of) their practice through the lens of three collaborative projects in kitchens, landscapes and waterways.

The first of these is Kitchen Cultures, 2020–22 (funded by AHRC and the Eden Project), a project that explored food sustainability in collaboration with Global Majority diaspora women in the kitchen through practices of fermentation and preservation (and which has now evolved into the Microbial Inheritance Library, 2024–).

The second is Songs of the Water, 2023– (funded by Counterpoints and Art Reach, Leicester), a collaborative audio project that uses embodied bio-acoustic sensing with Global Majority migrant communities in Leicester, Bristol and Leeds as a non-invasive technique to explore waterway biodiversity.

The third is Native Tongues, 2024 (funded by the Leverhulme Trust and ArtHouse Jersey), an artistic research collaboration with Dana Olărescu’s Abundant Futures. This project explores interrelationships of land, language and food biodiversity, bringing together older Jèrriais speakers and migrant children who are learning the language to discuss vernacular ways of caring for soil. Each of these projects uses the senses (touch, sound, smell, taste) to explore the idea of biodiversity as something that we are part of, inviting participants to relate to ecology differently, and to reflect on what we inherit from the past, and the responsibility this creates for the future.

Image: Eating (as) Ecology, Nourish@PRIMARY, 2021