Performance artist MR Vishnuprasad’s ‘Footnotes’ explores climate change and its impact on Kochi’s coastal regions

MR Vishnuprasad sits atop a column, at the central gallery space at Durbar Hall, while his audience gathers around him in a semicircle. He is set to present ‘Footnotes’, a performance based on tidal flooding in Kochi. There are no props in sight, other than a visual of a graph projected on the wall behind him, and no fanfare. 

How is a performance artist going to tackle a complex environmental issue in a gallery setting? As Vishnuprasad begins his narration, the questions begin to dissolve. He opens the piece by recounting a recurring nightmare — of everyday household objects floating about him. Broaching the issue gently, he builds a steady narrative around tidal flooding, bringing fact, data and real voices to the fore. 

“It is the daily reality of people living in Kochi’s coastal areas — how they deal with the quiet terror of the rising waters that refuse to leave their homes and how their lives now are defined by these tidal surges,” says Vishnuprasad, whose inquiry into climate change — climate injustices and ecological grief led him to the project. 

He visited the regions in Kochi plagued by saline water intrusion to understand and experience it first hand. No longer a seasonal phenomenon, tidal flooding has forced several families in Kochi’s coastal belt, including Vypin, Edavanakkad, Enikkara, Edakochi, and Thanthonithuruth, to abandon their homes. Though local collectives such as the Edakochi Janakeeya Samithi have been fighting for the cause, their plight continues. 

MR Vishnuprasad performing at Durbar Hall, Kochi
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Vishnuprasad gathered video footage of flooded homes from the archives of the Edakochi Janakeeya Samithi, and collaborating with video artist Akarsh Karunakaran, combined the footage with poetry, narrative text and live speech by residents of Edakochi to create his ‘lecture performance’. “I wanted real voices to be represented. It is their reality,” he adds. 

‘Footnotes’ has been conceived as a lecture performance, a relatively new form of performance art combining elements of a traditional lecture with that of performance art. The piece offers space for the scientific and the artistic worlds to meet, where fact blends with creative expression. Vishnuprasad’s own journey has been through these seemingly disparate worlds. With a masters in Environmental Science, and a background studying hydro geology, Vishnuprasad has worked with several organisations including the Centre for Environment Education. A poet and writer as well, he later took to the arts, especially intrigued by the spontaneity and thrill of performance art. He earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from JNU, Delhi and since then, has been exploring the various possibilities of the genre. After his debut Malayalam novel Matthias published earlier this year, Vishnuprasad is working on his next.

‘Footnotes’ will be an ongoing project, says Vishnuprasad, where he would continue his engagement with the issue. “It is not just a documentation, but a response to the changing realities.”