Our Pew Fellows interview series focuses on the artistic lives of our Fellows: their aspirations, influences, and creative challenges.

This week, we speak to landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (2017) whose collaborative work imagines new possibilities for design of the built environment and explores the lines separating land and water, and urban and rural environments. Their interest in how water and landscapes are visualized has taken them to diverse terrains around the world, including Bangalore, Mumbai, Jerusalem, the Himalayas, and, most recently, the Sundarbans in southern Bangladesh. Their design practice includes writing, imaging, teaching, and the use of a range of artistic media “to produce works and pedagogical processes that strive to draw out the material complexity and inherent dynamism of places,” they say. The duo are currently at work on Ocean of Rain: Ganga vs. Ganges, a multimedia exhibition that presents Ganga as rain rather than a river commonly called the Ganges. The exhibition follows from the argument of da Cunha’s forthcoming book The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent.

How did you come to the field of landscape architecture? What drew you to this work?

Trained as architects, we both came to landscape architecture with a shared sense of it being a ground of inquiry into design. We see it setting the terms by which places (and peoples) are measured, articulated, and transformed even before a project is conceived or the spade hits the dirt. This, of course, is not how the profession necessarily sees itself. To most landscape architects, landscape architecture is a practical discipline with a place in the process of designing built environments. However, each of us came to landscape architecture by a different route. Anuradha came to the field through education via a Masters in Landscape Architecture, a choice driven by the perceived need to situate architecture. Dilip came to it through his inquiry into cities, design, and planning in the course of pursuing his PhD although we like to think that it was through marriage!

Your work imagines new possibilities for design of the built environment, and your interest in how water and landscapes are visualized has taken you to diverse terrains around the world. How do you approach bringing together your research of these landscapes and design to explore the complexity of places?

Our method of inquiry operates between three environments: field, archives, and studio. Each propels us toward the other two in a bid to celebrate and draw out the material complexity and inherent dynamism of places. In the field, we walk, draw, photograph with an eye and ear tuned to meter and movement, material and horizon; but as much to rupture and dissonance. We seek out things that defy boundaries. Water is the most common of these things. It refuses to stay behind a line drawn to separate it from land, prompting us to question not just who drew this line and where they drew it, but why they saw drawing it as necessary in the first place. It keeps us from accepting flood as a natural event. But water is only the first of many things that defy boundaries. People and practices, particularly in the so-called “developing world” do the same. Their defiance is too easily described as “informal,”’ “underdeveloped,” or “otherness.” We turn the focus on the presumed necessity of the line and the difference it calls out.

It leads us to the archives where we extend the present to include a past that drew lines of separation, enforced them, and made them the ordinary and the everyday. In the studio, we re-visualize place, make sense of our traverses and transgressions in the field and the archives, and venture new possibilities that push against the limits of the real in a bid to be inventive yet effective.

Your artistic practice is collaborative. Can you explain each of your roles and your distinctive contributions? What are the benefits of working as an artistic team?

Our collaboration is driven more by sameness than by difference. We share a process of wandering before discerning, of getting lost before (not finding, but) making our way. Doing this requires not a grounding in individual abilities and respective disciplines and talents so much as a shared empathy for the particularity of landscapes that we traverse. We travel, document, talk, and breathe the places we engage. It is an immersion that has often included our daughter, Tara.

Of course, having said that, we build off each other’s skills. We draw on Dilip’s ability to conceive and unpack complex ideas and open new imaginations through drawing and writing, and Anuradha’s ability to pursue inquiry that begins in material engagement and various artistic practices. Together, we break new ground through writing, imaging, designing, and teaching. It is how we go beyond critique and representation to conceive new grounds of design.

You are both professors at PennDesign. How does your teaching practice influence your artistic practice and vice versa?

Teaching landscape architecture as a field of inquiry into design is a challenge in a milieu that maintains landscape architecture as a professional discipline. The first takes a transdisciplinary approach to landscape; the latter an interdisciplinary one. We enjoy bringing the two together not just because it opens students to the fundamental role that landscape can play in addition to the skills they learn to practice a profession; it also brings together our teaching and artistic practices. It allows us to test, expand, and transform our methods of inquiry while also allowing us to bring places of concern into the studios and classes we teach.

This year, Dilip stepped out of PennDesign in part because the pressures of a professional program to stay in its place are making it increasingly difficult to appreciate landscape architecture as an inquiry into design at large.

What single ethical consideration most impacts the decisions you make as a collaborative team?

In a world with an intense desire to individualize, we like to see our collaboration as seamless, not because it is, but because it strives to be. How does one attribute an idea or a piece of art that comes out of conversation, argument, and battling out differences? This is a consideration that we carry into places we traverse where the drive is often to see landscape in elements that make the scene—a pulling apart, as it were, before things are put back together. Our pursuits tend to take us “behind the scene” in an effort to uncover the frameworks, representational regimes, and infrastructures that go into making the scene.