Why Kochi high school students must experience the art installation KaBhuM!!!

By Rosamma Thomas* 

The Indian Ocean, the world’s third largest, is heating at a faster pace than other oceans. The large mass of water, and its high specific heat (heat required to raise temperature by one degree Celsius) means that small differences in temperature in the ocean make for large variations in heat energy. Heating of the ocean is thus causing unprecedented climate change. Monsoons have altered, and coastal communities are fast becoming climate refugees. 

An art installation called “KaBhuM!!!” (imitating the sound of an explosion, also an abbreviation of Kalakara Bhumi, or land of the artist) in Kochi, Kerala, is attempting to draw attention to this concern with a devastating exhibition at Kerala Museum.

As you enter the museum and walk towards this exhibition, you are invited to view a short documentary. You sit in a little room with its modest furniture all askew – the room is flooded, and your bench is perched atop concrete blocks. The plight of coastal communities that have been living with the floods is depicted in your surroundings, and even visiting such a space for a short while can give you a sense of the enormous inconvenience that water poses to communities that have survived for generations on the coast, earning a living from fishing.

Fisherfolk on the Kerala coast had modest homes that they used only for a short time each day, spending almost all their time on the beaches – that was, in hindsight, the idyllic lifestyle of these communities two generations ago. The shade of trees and abundance of fish in the sea meant there was enough to be busy with, for whole families.

In recent years, however, the sea has been inundating the coast – homes remain flooded not for days, as in generations prior, but for months on end. The salt can now be scraped off the walls when the water recedes; household implements and gadgets cannot survive this relentless war against corroding salt, huge blocks of which are on display at the museum. With nowhere to go, some families still cling to their flooded homes; they realize their struggle is destined for failure.

The exhibition has installations, sculpture, videos, paintings and images from academic papers explaining the science behind climate change, and the changes induced by “developments” like the deepening of the shipping channel at the harbour; this has resulted in erosion of the coast near Chellanam, to the south of the harbour, and accretion to the north, at Mallipuram.

There is a neat display of the solutions proposed – raising the houses mechanically, building small plots after elevating about half an acre of land. These are phenomenally expensive to execute for these poor communities, and there is no certainty how long even these houses might last, given that the Indian Ocean has risen over 30 cm in the last 100 years.

The exhibition is set to conclude on October 19, with the performance of a play, ‘Chévittorma’ – the prayer whispered to console the dying. The director of the play explains in the introductory video at the exhibition that the actors are drawn from the affected coastal communities – it was better to cast those with the lived experience of this reality than to hire professional actors. The play has that freshness and direct appeal because their inputs went into fashioning it. Even the name of the play came from suggestions offered by the actors themselves, who used the traditions of their belief system to represent their plight. The comfort offered to the dying is what they can now fall back on.

Radha Gomathy, the curator of this exhibition, has brought together a vast team of climate and social scientists, fisherfolk, engineers and architects, drama personnel, poets, artists and craftspeople into this exhibition; fittingly, it is housed in a museum dedicated to the city of Kochi by an industrialist who made his living from exporting produce drawn from the sea.

This is the kind of exhibition all high school students in Kochi must visit – to learn about the plight of people in their neighbourhood, and to have young eyes opened to what existed once, and may soon be lost.

One glimmer of hope is the revival of the mangroves, attempts for which are documented at the exhibition; these slow winds, and help conserve coasts.  

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*Freelance journalist