Tracing lines : People Place Palimpsest

“Tracing Lines” explores Indian rural landscapes situated in a bio-culturally rich monsoon biome, the Western Ghats. This time, we studied the forest villages of the Kani people (adivasis) in the Agasthyamalai ranges of Southern Western Ghats. The specific title “People Place Palimpsest” represents the studio process based on the idea of imaging and imagining cultural landscapes as palimpsests. People indicate rural communities, place homelands, and palimpsest is a metaphor and tool for reading landscape-culture entanglements. We began by decoding the ‘existing scripts of landscape’ using documentation methodologies that classify the innate attributes of the physical-cultural layers of landscapes that developed over time. Transdisciplinary in approach, we used many forms of spatial representation and ethnographic mapping techniques including emic and experimental readings, social and ecological documentation, anecdotal interviews and narratives, and imaginative interpretations. From the analytical stage, we developed the scripting to arrive at design process for landscape inserts with a strong sense of place and engagement with the community