Entangled Learnings: In Conversation with Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum

Describing itself as an itinerant system of pedagogy, the Forest Curriculum orchestrates conditions for mutual co-learning with a range of stakeholders such as academics, filmmakers, artists, activists and students. Evolving in scope through each instance of deployment, the Curriculum proposes to use “zomia" as the premise from which to queer the Anthropocene—a conception of planetary habitation that has been used by state actors to exploit and impoverish those outside the ambit of its definition. Gliding through material and temporal scales akin to the entangled histories of the forests that constitute zomia, the Curriculum affirms sentience for the inanimate, seeking to displace consolidated notions around human exceptionalism through relational networks.

As the Forest Curriculum states, zomia defies easy, reproducible navigability as well as the logic of data. The dense foliage of the belt dismantles infrastructures of state control, resulting in a slippage of identity and agency amongst its inhabiting lives. The Curriculum models itself on the “indisciplinarity” (a term coined by Jessica Khazrik) inherent to its mutating collectives. Indisciplinarity refers to ways of reorganising (indigenous) forms of knowledge that have not been “disciplined” yet—in the vein of imperialist epistemic appropriation. The concept informs the Forest Curriculum’s practice in that they propose a system of knowledge that can be produced and held together; this does not necessarily dismantle the institution, but seeks to reorient it to create a non-extractive model of transmission. In this continuing conversation, Pujita Guha for the Forest Curriculum talks about how they attempt to formulate said practice through sporadic gatherings and discussions, while consciously moving towards an “eco-sophical” mode of thinking rooted in the cosmologies of the natureculture formation of zomia.

^{(Featured Image: "In the Mountains the Only Money is Opium" by Pujita Guha. 2020. Zine, Bergamo GAMeC. Part of In the Forest Even the Air Breathes Group Exhibition curated by Abhijan Toto. Image courtesy of the artist.)}

Recorded on 21 February 2022. 

In case you missed the first part of this conversation, you can watch it here.

To read more about Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work, please click here.