The decomposing body is the sign of a biological cycle in place. A body not decomposing is because of the excessive extractive nature of systems placed by humans along with excessive release of toxicity which interrupts these cycles. Ironically the human body acting as a sponge absolves the toxicity and is unable to decompose. Here toxicity and extraction is not strictly bound to physical geological factors but is also the abstracted societal system, economic systems, logistics systems etc. It reveals how humans have ruptured most bio-cycles in the desire to create a utopia, placing abstracted systems which are steaming forward but not coming in full cycle. However, these thoughts lie subsidiary to one's emotional affection to living and death. A being in animation forms attachments, creates places of belonging, and gathers with others to mourn the death of a loved one. These acts are attempts to remain in relation to each other, to memory, and to the world even in the presence of mortality. There is a desire to hold onto the temporal, to leave traces of one's existence within a continuum larger than oneself. When one dies, the body returns to the cycle and a funeral marks this passage. But when the body absorbs the excretion of these mannered systems it becomes non decomposable.

In many indigenous traditions across Northeast India, death rituals once allowed nature to take its course, the body becoming part of the ecosystem and completing a cycle of return. This has changed. Ecological degradation, extractive development, pollution, changing land relations, and shifting social structures have altered both landscapes and the practices embedded within them. What happens when the ecological conditions that once sustained a ritual no longer exist? What does it mean when the cycles that communities relied upon for generations are interrupted? These changes are not simply logistical; they are deep disruptions of ecological and cultural symbiosis, revealing the scale at which environmental transformation is reshaping everyday life and collective memory.

This is where the residency becomes incredibly meaningful to me. It offers space to explore such questions through an intersectional and ecological lens, centering the communities carrying the burden of these transformations while finding new ways to remember, adapt, and resist. I am interested in how the shifting of these rituals tells us larger stories about development, extractive industry, conservation failures, and climate collapse. I do not treat rituals as static symbols but as ecological indicators, ones that reveal the intimate scale at which collapse is felt and negotiated. The Northeast, as a region of both fragile biodiversity and rich indigenous knowledge, offers critical insight into these negotiations. I believe that understanding how communities here have historically practiced and are now reimagining death rituals opens a speculative space for rethinking our relationships to care, decay, and the future.