Ragmala – Songs of Anthropocene by Sanjeev & Vaishali

The earth is changing constantly. A large number of species of birds, animals, insects, bacterium and other organisms are vanishing everyday at an alarming rate. They vanish with their songs. The new that replaces them, is an eruption of a different music... It has its new scale of tones, pitch and texture. It is the sound of destruction and devastation.

Increased rainfall and evaporation are intensifying cycles of drought and flooding worldwide. Equatorial countries — which depend on the decreasingly reliable summer monsoons for life-sustaining rains, and which tend to be hardest hit by El Niño’s storms and droughts — will suffer even more. Reports reiterate that sea levels will continue to rise, partly due to the glacial melt, but mainly because water expands as it warms. Higher seas, combined with increasingly powerful overwater storms, will devastate, destroy, or simply consume low-lying areas. Some studies estimate that there will be 150 million environmental refugees by midcentury, largely as a result of flooding in poor countries like Bangladesh, where 13 million people live within three feet of the sea level. The billions of dollars needed to rebuild New Orleans will be needed again and again and again, mostly by countries that don’t have them. Global warming, combined with continued habitat destruction, will accelerate the process. Our coral reefs and alpine meadows will be destroyed. Tropical diseases like malaria and dengue fever will spread to ever higher altitudes and latitudes.

“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” Albert Schweitzer

‘Ragmala - Songs of Anthropocene’ by Sanjeev & Vaishali uses embroidery as a medium to organise and understand what we as human beings are doing to our planet.

Why Ragmala, Anthropocene and Embroidery?

Ragmala is a series of illustrative paintings from medieval India depicting various Indian musical moods or Ragas. The images and moods painted, are based on a certain iconography developed over a few hundred years, and rendered in a style peculiar to each specific region.

Anthropocene is a recent terminology, signifying the impact of human beings on the earth's geology and ecosystems.

Embroidery, like music, has in its structure, 'weaving' a thread into a composition. The weave, the stitch, the knitting, the knotting and interlacing.