Sustain
In 2022, Monica Jahan Bose presented SUSTAIN, a public art project in Washington, DC bringing together communities in Washington DC and her ancestral village of Katakhali in Bangladesh to create saris and a soundwalk about food insecurity and the climate crisis. SUSTAIN celebrates ten years of the Storytelling with Saris art project. Curated by Sarah Tanguy, SUSTAIN is a collective response to sustainability featuring community-sourced poetry and art on saris with a special focus on urban and rural eco-agriculture. Co-created with women farmers from Bose’s endangered coastal village and DC participants, the 18-foot-long fuchsia and aqua saris wrap around the six grand columns of LINE DC’s façade and form a welcoming passageway at Unity Park in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Other highlights include a soundwalk, poetry slam, and film screenings about sustainable practices and the impacts of climate on agriculture and food security.
The culmination of public sari and urban gardening workshops, SUSTAIN draws attention to climate change and its greater devastation to women and communities of color across the globe. Melding tradition and innovation, Bose designed new woodblocks of seedlings, rice fields, bicycles along with coconuts as indicators of sustenance and adaptability, which her collaborators applied to handwoven cotton saris, a natural and archival material that symbolizes the cycle of life and predates colonization. The companion sonic compositions interweave poetry, music and songs in Bengali, English and ASL with ambient sounds of water, wind and birds taking audiences on an imaginative journey.
