Image by SV Krishna Chaitanya - This stretch along Ernakulam reveals a deeper shift: shared water and land commons now lie directly in the path of climate-linked tidal flooding
KaBhumM!!! unfolded across Ernakulam, Kerala, over the course of a month, creating a space where the lived realities of tidal flooding were made visible through an interwoven language of art, science, memory, and community testimony. Rather than treating climate change as a distant abstraction, the programme invited residents, practitioners, artists, and researchers into a slow, collective witnessing of how land, water, and people are being reshaped by recurring tidal inundation along the Kerala coast.
Installations, films, community conversations, and field interactions were placed across the city to invite the public into a deeper understanding of Kochi’s kadal–kayal–kandal ecosystems, where coastal and estuarine systems are losing their rhythm under the cumulative pressures of sea-level rise, land-use change, and erosion of traditional water-management practices.
This long duration allowed KaBhumM!!! to become more than an exhibition: it slowly accumulated voices and experiences, enabling Kochi’s tidal flooding to be recognised as a shared concern that sits at the intersection of ecological change, cultural memory, governance systems, and everyday life.
1. The collaborators behind KaBhumM!!!
KaBhumM!!! emerged from the Resilient Kochi initiative, led collaboratively by EQUINOCT CoSMoS, the Community Resource Centre at Puthenvelikkara, and the Resilient Destinations Foundation. Each organisation brought a different capability—scientific modelling, community mobilisation, and place-based implementation—coming together to create a grounded, people-centred approach to understanding Kochi’s changing coastline.
Around this core, an extended network of partners shaped the month-long experience: Common Ground, Asar, Kerala Lalithakala Akademi, Kerala Union of Working Journalists, The Blue Yonder, Inspiration Collective, KAITHA, Chevittorma community theatre, Thudippu Dance Foundation, and Papaya Media Designs.
The curatorial lead was Radha Gomaty, a visual artist, poet and educator who shaped the creative narrative of the exhibition. Other collaborators included artists, scientists, local communities from Kochi’s tidal-flood affected zones, and research practitioners reconstructing lived experience into installation art and data-driven storytelling. Their contributions ranged from artistic curation and visual storytelling to theatre, community outreach, documentation, and research.
The breadth of this collaboration reflected a shared commitment to co-creating knowledge, where scientific evidence, cultural practice, journalistic inquiry, and community narratives are held together as complementary ways of understanding slow-onset climate impacts. The process mirrored the essence of Commons governance, with many actors holding shared responsibility for shaping meaning, building preparedness, and strengthening the collective ability to respond.
2. Common Ground’s Two-Day Immersion Within a Larger Month-Long Experience
Within the broader month-long arc of KaBhumM!!!, Common Ground partners participated in a two-day learning journey on 18–19 October, joining as collaborators seeking to understand how different forms of knowledge—scientific, cultural, experiential, and artistic—could be held together to articulate the lived experience of the coastal Commons.
The immersion created opportunities for partners from Jharkhand, Odisha, Meghalaya, and Tamil Nadu to engage directly with Kochi’s tidal landscapes and, in doing so, recognise echoes of their own contexts. Discussions on disrupted tidal cycles and the collapse of pokkali–prawn calendars resonated with Jharkhand’s experiences of shifting forest-fire patterns and their impact on cropping cycles; narratives from women in Kochi navigating flooded kitchens and saltwater intrusion connected with Odisha’s estuarine households, where changing water regimes disproportionately reorganise care work and livelihoods; Meghalaya’s representatives saw parallels between Kochi’s altered hydrology and the fragile balance of hill ecosystems where community institutions, rather than formal state structures, anchor land and water stewardship; and journalists from Tamil Nadu connected Kochi’s story of disappearing buffers with their own districts where coastal erosion and poor drainage reshape fishing livelihoods.
A key moment of this exchange unfolded at Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) during the session on Climate as Commons: Financing Resilience for Kochi, where scientists, panchayat leaders, civil society organisations, journalists, and community practitioners examined Kochi’s tidal flooding as a systemic erosion of Commons—an imbalance between sea, estuary, and mangrove systems shaped by decades of reclamation, deepened shipping channels, and weakened water-management infrastructures. The discussion offered a shared vocabulary for partners to interpret ecological change not as an isolated event but as an outcome of interconnected decisions, institutional arrangements, and cumulative pressures.
Dr C. G. Madhusoodhanan’s (CEO, Equinoct) presentation on the architecture of climate finance; its policies, institutions, intermediaries, and flows, opened up conversations on how communities across India might access resources to strengthen adaptation. Partners contributed reflections from their own landscapes: Jharkhand’s community fire-management practices, Odisha’s localised water-governance traditions, Meghalaya’s matrilineal ownership structures and forest cooperatives, and Tamil Nadu’s experiences of coastal sediment shifts. Through these exchanges, participants collectively explored what it means for adaptation to be rooted in local knowledge while supported by scientific tools and public financing.
The sequence of interactions; walking through Ezhikkara’s submerged wards, listening to panchayat leaders describe the slow, creeping nature of tidal flooding, observing EQUINOCT’s work digitising traditional water knowledge, entering the silence of The Flooded House, watching Jalamudra trace fifteen years of estuarine change, and experiencing community theatre that turned lived distress into collective expression, created a shared space for interpretation. Partners reflected together on how ecological disruption is mediated by cultural identity, institutional memory, and the everyday governance routines that hold Commons together. This lateral exchange, grounded in direct exposure and mutual listening, allowed each geography to see its own challenges refracted through the lens of Kochi’s slow-onset crisis.
Image by SV Krishna Chaitanya
The visit to the pokkali fields offered a clear view of how rising tides unsettle long-standing agrarian rhythms, with water arriving earlier and staying longer than the cycles that once guided rice and prawn cultivation. Standing at the farm edges with the panchayat leadership, partners saw how these disruptions erode not just yields but the cooperative systems, seasonal calendars, and shared governance practices that have historically sustained coastal livelihoods.
The performances of Otta and Chevittorma offered two distinct yet connected ways of understanding how communities live with recurring tides—Otta tracing the quiet strength and grace with which people hold ground through shifting water, and Chevittorma turning lived experience into collective testimony on a stage layered with the objects and memories of flooded homes. Together, they revealed how cultural expression becomes a way of making sense of slow disasters, carrying forward the emotional and ecological weight of changing coastal landscapes.
Rather than generating a single narrative, the visit enabled an alignment of perspectives: that climate impacts are relational, moving across landscapes in ways that unsettle traditional practices, reshape community institutions, and test the adaptive capacity of local governance systems. It strengthened a collective understanding that meaningful adaptation emerges not from externally designed solutions but through co-creation with communities who interpret change daily and whose knowledge, when supported by science and collaborative action, becomes the foundation for resilient Commons.
Read more about the two-day immersion here.
3. What the month revealed for Climate and Commons governance
The month-long experience of KaBhumM!!! revealed how climate communication deepens when communities themselves shape the metaphors, data practices, and artistic expressions that describe their changing landscapes. EQUINOCT’s work with local residents to digitise traditional lunar calendars, build flood-monitoring tools, and document inundation patterns demonstrated how community knowledge and scientific inquiry can evolve together to inform local governance. Installations and performances rooted in lived memory underscored that slow disasters are not simply ecological shifts; they reorganise labour, unsettle social relationships, and disrupt long-held systems of water and land stewardship.
The dialogues at CUSAT further illustrated that resilience requires more than infrastructure; it requires sustained relationships between local governments, community institutions, cultural networks, and scientific actors who can collectively interpret change and act upon it.
For Common Ground, KaBhumM!!! offered a clear reminder that the work of strengthening Commons lies in creating the conditions for shared sense-making, where communities, practitioners, and policymakers recognise the interdependence of ecological systems and human systems. The experience reaffirmed that co-creation is not a technique but an ongoing process of aligning capabilities, listening across boundaries, and building responses rooted in the everyday wisdom of those who live closest to the Commons.
Some stories that emerged from the immersion at KaBhumM!!!
