Submissions | VizChitra 2026
Atlas of Water Systems and Structures in Bidar
Adhavan
Fellow•Living Labs Institute
Description
We propose to create a physical experience of place-based oral histories of living practices around water and water structures in Bidar. It will include interviews, media, structures and contexts of people and communities where we have fostered relationships over the years. These include communities who steward water structures along with farmers, pastoralists, well-diggers, wanderers, scientists, CSO Members. It will draw from our present spatial archive of wells in the district from the Participatory Geospatial Lab. We will work with artisanal communities to co-create tapestries of communities' relationships with water structures and oral histories of those waterstructures.
Bidar is semi-arid but not water scarce. The diversity in our archive serves as a counter-narrative to the feigned helplessness crept in today's imagination and decisions based on the past experiences of the drought periods. The voices in this archive and exhibit will highlight different relation to water and water structures through tacit knowledge gained from their use, interactions, maintenance, repair, and restorations. These infrastructures have embodied a sustainable understanding of landscape and its co-habitants. In the present, such water systems (bawdis, barambawdis, streams) are consistently developed over by present imaginations of water systems: reservoirs, tanks, pipes and so on. Such centralisation in simultaneously helpful and unhelpful: in that the scale of such systems have reached dense and remote spaces, but have made decentralised systems lost and unusable in the present, Wells are forgotten, collapsed, filled. We co-envision this oral history exhibit to feed into amendments of local by-laws, Panchayati charters, public engagement activities.
Data Source
The base archive is a geolocated archive of wells along with media and spatial narratives associated with them. We have over 200 wells and water bodies of different kinds mapped across the district from fieldwork spanning multiple years, type of water structure, current condition, current use, and settlements along with photographs of them. This work was possible because of over a decade of work conserving and monitoring wells which has given us a rich network of farmers, well diggers, contractors, scientists and pastoralists, with whom we will record interviews and oral histories to be displayed as multi-media recordings.
We will work with Local knowledge keepers, their oral histories and artisanal communities to co-create tapestries of the spatial knowledge around water structures, that will become the primary element of the exhibit.
https://pgsl.aruvu.org/ contains the present archive. Oral Histories will be documented in between now and July 2026
Technical Requirements
We will need a 15x15 foot space approximately to display the tapestry and the multimedia display canvas. A projector and a camera-enabled system for a projection mapped interface for the viewer to interact with.
Project Status & Timeline
The spatial repository is already present at pgsl.aruvu.org, along with multimedia for some of the wells. Oral Histories of local knowledge holders will be documented in the time available and a collaboration between us, the oral history holder and the artisan communities decided and put into action. Our experience with collaborative artisanal engagements with our network tell us that we will need a few months to complete the tapestry, that will be possible since the exhibition is on 4th July.
Previous Work
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Living Labs Institute
Living Labs Institute (https://livinglabs.institute), LLI is a learning space grounded in place-based approach, where learning unfolds within the communities of Bidar, Kundapura, and Channapatna. LLI was started with the foundation of our long-term engagements with the people of each place.