Project leaders from Maraa and Salon Emmer collaboratively explored and imagined notions of creative public protest through performance and utilization of the body as a tool of aesthetic protest and “voice” to address urban ecological issues. Interventions and actions took different forms and were collectively devised through community engagement workshops that aimed to engage a diverse range of participants. One action was ‘81 Maps of Shantinagar’, which rose out of a series of walks and interactions with the surrounding areas of 1Shantiroad. Suresh Jayaram, visual artist and historian took the artists on a
neighbourhood walk and a tour of the Lalbagh gardens. Been provided with this context of the visible Shantinagar and its landmarks, the attempt was to trace “invisible parts” of the neighbourhood and get residents from different urban classes in the area to participate in a collective process of mapping. Another action was ‘Rootless Rituals’, where the collaborators went out to specific site which had lost trees to infrastructural development and demonstrated their dissent through movement, visual triggers and facilitated dialogue.

Through the actions and initiatives carried out, the Katte Project team was faced with the challenges presented to their particular form of activism, which was either misinterpreted or considered as problematic for a variety of reasons. This particular method was not working in their favour to involve citizen participation, but was in-fact alienating them further from the root of the problem. To re-examine the nature of ecological importance within an urban cultural space, a tree festival that involved lateral and parallel imaginations of the importance of ecology was conceptualised. The festival tried to engage many urban groups including artists, students, eco-activists, educators and everyday citizens. The program was organized in collaboration with the interest of the participants, and took place over two consecutive weekends in June and July of 2010

The “Around a Tree” festival programmed a wide range of activities. On the first weekend, a screening session or Vriksha Chitra was organized at the 1 Shanthiroad gallery space. Films and video art relevant to the topic of tree-conservation were shown, with conversations facilitated by the project team. During the same weekend, a mobile poster gallery or Marangala Meravanige (A procession of Trees) was organized. The idea was to use the imagery of the posters to take conversations to any densely populated site within the city, and strike up conversations and dialog in a guerilla fashion.

The second weekend of the festival was held at Cubbon Park and featured a musical interpretation of famed Indian poet Kabir’s ecological reminiscences; workshops on eco-art and theatre for children, and a
participative public art installation at a site marked for tree felling.