This pathway is an invitation to approach, engage, and map landscape and ecology through sensorial research methods. In our own practice, as artists grappling with the violence of land accumulation, the dispossession of indigenous communities, and concomitant ecological devastation in Karachi, we often also have to contend with the violence latent in practices of research and representation.

When it comes to theorizing the senses as modes of research, perception, and relation, much has been said about the violence of the gaze. As feminist theorist Donna Haraway writes in her 1998 essay “Situated Knowledges”: “The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity—honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy—to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.” Haraway highlights how the dizzying developments in visualization technologies over the past century have enforced disembodied, distanced ways of seeing that flatten, obscure, and evoke in the viewer a sense of great power, enabling an “unregulated gluttony.” Living in a country subject to decades of drone warfare, the violence of these technologies is not lost on us. As we study the ways in which the neocolonial Pakistani state perpetuates a colonial, extractivist relationship with the land, we seek to also grapple with the colonial and extractivist nature of the gaze, the colonial history of the map, and the colonial nature of the tools and conventions of mapmaking. Against the gluttonous, disembodied gaze, we are interested in approaches to research as a slow, relational practice of connection, collaboration, and care. We are interested in research that grapples with the limitations, the failures, and the possibilities of visualization technologies and data to truly, holistically apprehend the violence of the Anthropocene. We are interested in work that grapples with the ways in which the land defies, undoes, and evades these technologies and practices, and the ways in which these technologies and practices may be reclaimed from their entanglements with militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

The works encountered along this pathway abdicate the position of the detached observer in favor of immersion and entanglement as a method of knowing.4.2.1 This collection of projects, materials, and propositions attends to that which is not immediately visible to the eye, slower and participatory processes of research, and a different kind of attunement where big data and geomapping is refused and where trust is laid in both older and newer forms of sensing and connection. It disturbs conventions of storytelling and representing that reproduce what cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter terms “Man’s” geographies and instead centers the recognition and restoration of interdependencies across people, landscapes, and indigenous ecologies.4.2.2

The objects in this pathway also share a tendency to challenge traditional geographic formulations, leaving behind colonial protocols and the ever so familiar tools of maps, official records, and data. The methods encountered here urge the unlearning of colonial and extractivist forms of knowledge production4.2.3 and the imagining of new relations across communities, environments, and geographies.4.2.4

How do we as artists and researchers begin to delineate a relationship with the land, at a time when we are immensely and profoundly alienated from it? We often fall back on maps to mediate our relationship with space. Yet maps continually flatten, erase, and obscure, delimiting our vision, knowledge, and connection with space. Their obscuring mechanisms and imperial processes have real and material consequences that enact a range of violences and degradations on land, soil, plants, animals, and people—in ways often diffuse, drawn out, and elusive. The practices brought together here activate sensorial registers beyond sight, to, as artist Monica Moses Haller puts it, “perceive the gaps between what literally cannot be seen and heard in nature, but which already and always exists in a place.”4.2.5

This pathway initiates encounters with a variety of ecological forms, from plant to soil to river, and the wisdoms they unfold. In the urban landscape, deep contemplation of the erased ecologies that cities are built upon destabilizes and unravels, exposing all the fallacies prevalent in dominant urban narratives, as the key contribution accompanying this pathway explores. Crucial questions of location, belonging, kinship, and intimacy with the land come into play when interrogating the ethics of witnessing its devastation.4.2.6 To bear witness can be a transformative act of care in the face of long-drawn-out extractivist violence.4.2.7 This pathway navigates across geographies and across temporalities. Contemplating our ecosystems can move us across space and time, where the maps of our present-day crises unfold into vast, multiscalar, interconnected cosmographies.4.2.8