Isadora Romero and Soumya Sankar Bose at Rencontres d’Arles 2023

Soumya Sankar Bose

At this summer’s Rencontres d’Arles, Magnum Foundation is pleased to be supporting two exhibitions by Magnum Foundation Fellows: Isadora Romero’s Fume, Root, Seed and Soumya Sankar Bose’s A Discreet Exit through the Darkness, both curated by Tanvi Mishra in conjunction with the Louis Roederer Discovery Award. On view July 3 - August 27, 2023.

About Isadora Romero’s Fume, Root, Seed (Presented by Magnum Foundation)

When Isadora Romero found out that her great-grandmother and grandfather were seed guardians, she wondered if the need to tell stories about agrobiodiversity was in her blood. Over the last 20 years, 75% of seed varieties have been lost worldwide. Romero’s visual research engages with how the loss of ancestral memory and Indigenous knowledge ‒ resulting from colonization, forced displacement, and racism ‒ is causing seeds to disappear at an alarming rate.

Moving across multiple geographies in Latin America, Romero examines this crisis with breadth and precision. In Paraguay, she observes how women collectivize to counter agribusiness that limits produce for local consumption, and the inequitable land distribution that such businesses benefit from. In Mexico, she looks at the cultural significance of food and how the preservation of domesticated plants can be shaped by their relationship to the human species. In Ecuador, she attempts to understand the dual approaches towards conservation ‒ the Indigenous and the conventionally scientific ‒ acknowledging the investment of both communities in similar goals, but also the lack of dialogue between them. Her own family’s history in Colombia, and their contribution to the preservation of the potato seed, becomes the catalyst and culmination of the ethos of the project.

The excerpted chapters in this exhibition offer an alternate way of looking at environmental issues ‒ through the prism of possibility, instead of catastrophic consequence. Each one privileges a resistance: be it from women organizing against monoculture or from people for whom inherited knowledge systems are guiding forces. In looking towards the past, and to those that continue to relate to land, Fume, Root, Seed recalibrates the approach we adopt towards conversations around conservation. Learn more about the exhibit here.

About Soumya Sankar Bose’s A Discreet Exit through the Darkness (Presented by Experimenter with support from Magnum Foundation)

In 1969, at the tender age of nine, Soumya Sankar Bose’s mother went missing after she went to the neighbourhood confectionery to buy sweets for a religious offering. She was found three years later.

In an effort to piece together the incident related to the disappearance of his mother, Bose examines memory and its shifting nature in A Discreet Exit through the Darkness. Since his mother’s memory of the time was “wiped clean” due to prosopagnosia ‒ a condition that limits her ability to remember the facial features of the traffickers who kidnapped her ‒ Bose attempts to reconstruct the past based on the collective memory of his family members. Through the process, he continuously encounters conflicting accounts and unearths familial traumas resulting from an incident that left the household divided. In the absence of a cohesive record, the story of his mother’s disappearance enters the realm of fantasy, tinged with folklore and superstition.

Working on the edge of fiction ‒ recreating images inspired by real-life events ‒ Bose’s practice plays on photography’s complicated relationship with memory and truth. In acknowledging the speculative potential of the image, this work explores possible scenarios relating to his mother’s abduction, unfolding against the backdrop of the riots that preceded the partition of Bengal in 1971, ongoing at the time. Bose’s maternal grandfather, who was leading the search for his daughter, died the year before she was rescued. With his death, the trail of information on her disappearance was lost forever.

Accompanied by a reading from his grandfather’s fictional diary, Bose takes us on the journey of this search ‒ for his mother, and for that singular narrative that eludes the family that endured this irreparable loss. Learn more about the exhibit here.