ECO-SWARAJ | Words for the Future

Swaraj means self-rule, responsiblity and ‘care for the other’. Ashish Kothari adds ‘eco’: informed by nature. As an environmentalist, he follows grass-root communities in India that are ‘Eco-Swaraj’ – as they responsibly govern their ways of living-with their natural environment. Ashish forsees an accumulation of such initiatives in what he calls RED; a Radical Ecological Democracy. Rodrigro Sobarzo, a visual performance maker, sends photos of the Andes Mountains shot with his phone through the airplane window on his way home to Chile. Later, in a conversation, he gives me two words that should accompagny them: Time Troubler: “We and the earth, together we share the time. By making trouble, you make it yours.”

Words for the Future is a many-voiced series of ten words that point to the possible imaginations of various futures. Ten people from diverse fields of knowledge were asked to propose a word for the future through an essay, while an artist in whose work this particular world seemed to already be latently present, was invited to respond to it. Bringing both perspectives together in one publications, each issue becomes a dialogue around one world.

ECO-SWARAJ is issue #4 in the series Words for the Future, curated and edited by dramaturg Nienke Scholts. (The full series (limited edition) is available through San Serriffe aswell.)