REALMS is a landscape practice
(design, research, teaching, making).
Tied Across Time
Shifting Lubra
Complexities of Flood Disaster
A Landscape that has Never Existed
Trajectories of Practice Across Time
Agencies of the Present
Landscape is Knowledge
Fuel and the Himalayan Future
Open-ended Landscape
Belonging/Not Belonging
Emerging Hybridity & the New Vernacular
Willow and Water
Ascent
At the Meeting of Earth and Sky
Passage & Discovery
Agency of a Path
Transient Materials
Fagopyrum tataricum
About
Willow and Water
2016
Kathmandu, Nepal
Willow trees are known for their resilience, remediative capacity, productive value, and soil retention capacities. They are also a significant component of the historical landscape of Kathmandu. In period photographs, tall rows of willows line the Bagmati River. Cultural campaigner Huta Ram Baidya recalls “a festive past scene of Shiva Ratri, in which he walks along a clean, stone-paved ghat lined with rows of willows.”
Narratives surrounding the restoration of the heavily degraded Bagmati focus on one of three programs: cultural landscape, ecological restoration, and social programming. Willow & Water proposes to demonstrate the common purpose of these programs. The willow tree (Salix babylonica) creates a new economy built on the maintenance and harvesting of coppiced willows by displaced peoples. It also restores the rapidly degrading cultural landscape of the Bagmati River while remediating riverine pollution. During the annual monsoon, tiered landforms guide water away from vulnerable temporary settlements while establishing communal infrastructures.
Kathmandu, Nepal
Willow trees are known for their resilience, remediative capacity, productive value, and soil retention capacities. They are also a significant component of the historical landscape of Kathmandu. In period photographs, tall rows of willows line the Bagmati River. Cultural campaigner Huta Ram Baidya recalls “a festive past scene of Shiva Ratri, in which he walks along a clean, stone-paved ghat lined with rows of willows.”
Narratives surrounding the restoration of the heavily degraded Bagmati focus on one of three programs: cultural landscape, ecological restoration, and social programming. Willow & Water proposes to demonstrate the common purpose of these programs. The willow tree (Salix babylonica) creates a new economy built on the maintenance and harvesting of coppiced willows by displaced peoples. It also restores the rapidly degrading cultural landscape of the Bagmati River while remediating riverine pollution. During the annual monsoon, tiered landforms guide water away from vulnerable temporary settlements while establishing communal infrastructures.