Curating Erasure: When Art Festivals Colonise Goa’s Rivers
Wency Mendes
Curating Erasure: When Art Festivals Colonise Goa’s Rivers
This is the season of joy and celebration, the most wonderful time of the year, marked by the annual spectacle of art and serendipity. This year, the festival marks its ten-year milestone of hosting performances, exhibitions, dialogues, and interactive workshops in Goa.
Since its inception, the festival has undergone a journey of growth. Goan art, once segregated under the banner of the ‘Goan Artist’, has shifted towards a more inclusive arrangement, where Goans appear as curators and artists in their own right. Yet, beneath this celebratory surface lies a quiet and persistent concern.
There is an erasure and a displacement of meaning, within ways of doing, in cultural practices, and in the emergence of new hegemonic structures that conform to the logic of the ‘festival’. This erasure takes form in the neo-narrative of the village of Kurdi, and in the silencing of violence inflicted upon women and communities, as these newly crafted stories circulate through film festivals, biennales, and cultural spaces shaped by caste and gendered power.
Meanings also shift when gods who embody ephemerality are rendered permanent as sculptures, extended beyond their single-day existence. Narkasur, once understood as immolating himself into enlightenment – liberation from maya (illusion) – or, in other tellings, imploring Kamakhya to slay him into deliverance, carried meanings rooted in release from material temporality and union with Brahman. This was what was once celebrated.
Alas, no longer. These meanings are now trapped within the spectacle of the art-tourism circuit, circulating from Goa to Kochi and beyond.
What is not a happy accident – and far more difficult to digest – is The Barge.
The barge first appeared at the festival in 2017. On the Barge / The Ground Beneath My Feet, a project led by the curator of the Kochi Biennale 2026 in collaboration with HH Art Spaces, Asia Art Archive, and the Japan Foundation, brought together four iterations of artworks in Goa. The exhibition was framed as a reconstruction of fragments from the barge, invoking “precarious fragments of land surrounded by rising oceans and migrating populations.” It was presented as a political reckoning with turbulent geopolitics – migrant labour, climate change, refugees, and so-called “unrealised utopias”.
Vishal K. Dar was invited as the mise-en-scène for the project. Performance artists included Bengaluru-based Hemant Sreekumar; New Delhi – based Bhagwati Prasad, whose sound work addressed human labour, German artist Anja Ibsch, whose practice explores the limits of bodily endurance; Japanese Butoh dancer and choreographer Yuko Kaseki; and Kabir Masum Chisty, an artist from Bangladesh, who performed a work involving burying himself in sand inside a box on the barge.
Yet, no contextualisation of Goa or its histories was offered, nor was there any meaningful engagement with the local. Instead, the barge – a long-standing symbol of ecological destruction in Goa’s rivers and lands, whose iron ore once fuelled Japan’s post–Second World War reconstruction – was emptied of its specific histories and restaged as spectacle.
Here, the Japan Foundation, alongside international artists, academicians from Ambedkar University, theoreticians from Delhi, and archivists from Asia Art Archive – now embedded within major Middle Eastern institutions – rewrote Goa’s histories. In doing so, they erased the pain, suffering, and degradation endured by its people, lands, and waters. This was not curation but a continuation of colonial dispossession: a modality of power that appropriates while masquerading as interpretation.
The barge now returns in December 2025 at the Captain of Ports Jetty in Old Goa. This time, the curator is Veeranganakumari Solanki, co-director of the SqW:Lab Foundation and a member of the advisory committee of the Piramal Photography Gallery at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai. The artists on board – Prajakta Potnis, Hemant Sreekumar, and Julien Segard – respond to ideas of absence and presence through the barge’s architecture and sound.
In Goa, along the Mandovi, we are already facing an ecological disaster caused by the permanent anchoring of casino boats. Their presence disrupts sediment flow, causing localised erosion and shoal formation. Associated activities such as dredging physically alter the riverbed, while pollution from sewage, waste, and fuel degrades sediment quality and aquatic life. These impacts threaten traditional clam-fishing grounds (tisryos), alter critical marine habitats, and destabilise the river’s ecosystem.
Sound pollution – from tourism, parties, traffic, and construction – further intensifies this crisis. It disrupts marine behaviour in fish and mammals, induces chronic stress in wildlife, and damages sensitive ecosystems such as mangrove zones. Central studies have identified acoustic pollution hotspots along the coast and have recommended stricter enforcement, citing links to fish scarcity and broader ecological imbalance.
The barge has already been anchored in Old Goa for a considerable period and will remain so until the end of this spectacle-festival. Old Goa supports a rich diversity of mangroves, otters, cephalopods, crabs, fish, and migratory birds. Its riverbanks are home to fishing communities whose livelihoods depend on daily catches from these waters.
The infrasonic and low-frequency sounds generated by performances on the barge pose further – and potentially irreversible – harm to local flora and fauna, intensifying stress on an already fragile and contested ecological space.
Upon the barge, neither the sound works nor the palm and AI abstractions engage meaningfully with the ecology or the socio-cultural politics of Goan communities. The sparse references to mining – coal and iron – remain shallow, functioning as afterthoughts or crude justifications for the work’s presence, without engaging Goa’s deep entanglements with extraction, minerals, and wealth-capital generation.
What emerges instead is an exoticised and fetishised spectacle, where meaning is imposed through the gendered, caste, and class authority of the curator. In this process, the material histories of extraction, ecological destruction, and lived harm caused by the barge itself are actively erased.
What continues is the impunity of settler-colonial violence upon the people of Goa: the sustained erasure of our histories; displacement through fetishised walks and displays; and the devaluing and deskilling of our traditional knowledge systems and practices. All of this is produced through the construction of normative, hegemonic meaning-making, masked as serendipitous art language.
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