However much we may bury and build upon it, the landscape of Karachi demands to be known. Ecstatic Ecopedagogies offers the space to read, listen, reflect and gather, with several text, image and audio offerings drawing from Karachi LaJamia’s research and teaching practice over the past decade. The relationship between the city dwellers of Karachi and the ecology of its land has primarily been marked by violence. This violence has been both slow and spectacular, and caused a deep alienation. This project seeks to move beyond this painful disconnect into recognising and inhabiting, with care, our shared destinies with this ecology.
A video offers glimpses into the years of fieldwork in Karachi’s coastal and pastoral landscapes, alongside communities resisting real estate development and infrastructural projects. A series of publications offers case-studies into the practice, divided along the themes of land, water, militarism and institutions. A soundscape offers visitors moments of immersion into the encounters and experiences that have soundtracked Karachi LaJamia’s site-specific research.
Karachi LaJamia was founded in 2015 by artists Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani as a nomadic space moving outside the institution to collectively explore new radical pedagogies and art practices. Since 2015, they have facilitated site-specific courses and collaborative research projects exploring the intersections of militarism, land accumulation, climate crisis, indigenous dispossession, and knowledge production in Karachi. Their courses occupy public spaces as sites of study, disrupting imperial modes of knowledge production and circulation.
They work closely with local organisations and activists to build solidarity with ongoing struggles, while seeking to learn, share, and produce knowledge collectively, exploring new ways of inhabiting, knowing, and being with the city and with each other.
