Crash !!

This project attempts to draw attention to the disturbing rate at which Sandalwood forests are being felled into extinction, through lack of conservation efforts, state apathy and neglect, and the depredations of individuals such as the notorious profiteer/poacher/sandalwood smuggler Veerappan who from his base in the forests eluded the law for many years until he was finally gunned down by the police.
The thrust of this participatory art project is to combine the urgency
of the situation [annihilation of a species] with the act of ‘airdropping’
[emergency supply] where one of the most valued, cherished, worshipped, widely used and illegally felled trees is ‘given a chance’ for survival through a symbolic rendering of conservation manifesting itself through the spectacle of a ‘message from the skies’.

Crane + Tree

The artwork is an effort to metaphorically render the condition all too familiar to anyone, including environmentalists, activists, urban planners, designers, contractors and builders, trapped in litigation procedures in the Indian judicial system. Uprooting, dislocation, relocation, rehabilitation, resettlement, compensation: these terms are now inherent in any discourse of urban ‘development’, and function as the rhetorical axes upon which are plotted the points of conflict between the urban, semi-urban and rural sectors struggling for space as the city expands.