Landless
A collaborative work by Arda Awais & Savena Surana, Identity 2.0 and Shubhi Sachan, Material Library of India through the DesignKind programme.
Landless site (2022) by Identity 2.0 and Shubhi SachanDo The Green Thing
Material Library of India and Identity 2.0 have come together to create an interactive resource exploring the themes of racial and climate justice by looking at climate refugees. For the full experience access the site here.
Arda Awais & Savena Surana, Identity 2.0
Identity 2.0 is a creative studio working at the intersection of digital rights, technology and identity. They produce work independently and with clients that explores what it means to exist online.
Their approach combines creative technology, immersive experiences and humour to create accessible and fun spaces to explore serious and important conversations.
Shubhi Sachan, Material Library of India
The practice at the Material Library of India is focused on investigating value chains and making waste materials come to life again. This is the rebirth of materials that were once exiled to towering landfills or incinerators.
The focus is on remodelling the use of industrial & agricultural waste materials by combining the knowledge and skills of traditional crafts with modern materials.
Collaborative process
Their discussions ranged from utopian visions in which racial injustice would not impact migrations, to the grassroot organisations leading migrant justice. Both base their practice in research with clear outcomes. So a decision was made to form an interactive map, acting as a resource to kickstart the conversation about climate refugees.
Landless
Exploring the interactive site
Final Output
With a prompt to look at the climate crisis through the lens of racial injustice, they began to focus on climate refugees; a term which defines the new wave of migrants moving due to uninhabitable environments caused by climate change. They quickly learnt that there was little international protection for them. In parallel, they began thinking about the prevalence of borders - how passing from one space to another renders some items and people illegal.
Boundaries shape our lives. They secure items, make people feel safe and protect us. But they also turn objects and people illegal, depending on where they are. For some countries, borders are put above all else. It’s from here we start. With climate change ravaging our world, the power of borders feels questionable. They are strengthened by nationalism against the perceived threats of migrants. Yet they are also disappearing. Literally. Rising sea levels, ravaging wildfires and torrential weather are turning countries uninhabitable. Soon, they will have no border to protect.
And as this occurs, migrants will move across borders to protect themselves for safety from the effects of climate change. This new emerging group is called Climate Refugees. Despite 1000s of people around the world already displaced due to climate change, there is no international protection for them at the time of writing this.
From the prompt they created an interactive map which explores six key areas where the climate migrant crisis will peak, and the borders which will leave them landless. The hope in creating this digital experience is to provoke you to question why borders are placed above lives.
Landless 2 (2022) by Identity 2.0 and Shubhi SachanDo The Green Thing
