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Project short description

Bharath Ananthanarayana is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. His research is a 'following' of ginger into its commodity-scape emerging out of the Western Ghats in India is an interactive documentary practice.

Project long description

Commodity chains have come of age. They no longer display a classic followability, like many studies that ‘follow-the-thing’ by tracing an object back to its source of production. The more one follows, the more one notices that certain sections of the system-of-provision become ‘mutable’ and ‘disposable’ (Hulme, 2016). My thing of following, ginger, similarly is constantly in a flux, shows traits of mobility and transience, and loves a rupture. I follow ginger beginning in the Western Ghats of India across multiple sites, to discover the often-overlooked processes, dynamics and connections between people, cultures, technology, and the 'gaps’ in its economy (Sodero et al, 2021).

I adopt a messy method to uncover the patchiness of the following, as an interactive documentary practice. It is an endeavour to develop expanded and open-space ways of thinking with and through the documentary. Following ginger across multiple sites, through this process, foregrounds the messiness of the tangle surrounding it, acknowledging the complexity and uncertainty in its ongoing-ness. The practice offers potential to work with documentary in ways that are collaborative, non-hierarchical, polyphonic, and unresolved. It affords ‘staying with the trouble’ as against seeking resolution and closure based on dramatic narrative and a linear causal thinking (Polyphonic Documentary, 2021). The resulting polyphonic documentary offers accessibility - to the missing sub-altern, and to an audience beyond the academic circles. The documentary emerges as a tool helping negotiate increasingly urgent challenges of ecological degradation and ideological polarisation.