After travelling to Pune, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, Tracing Narratives will be showcased in Chennai.Hosted by the Chennai Architecture Foundation, the exhibition will follow our country’s connect with gardens.

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As part of Landscape Environment Advancement Foundation (LEAF), which was founded by his father, late Prof Prabhakar B Bhagwat in 2003, they set up a ‘million garden initiative’, asking people to send in names of places they felt constitute a garden. “This brought up places that we normally don’t consider as gardens. For example, a place in the middle of the desert in Kutch, Kala Dungar, where a priest feeds wolves, an ancient crater that had become a lake around which there are many gardens and temples,” Aniket recalls.

This expanded their idea of what a garden meant. They then began questioning why landscape architecture, instead of being celebrated, is being disregarded. “We concluded that it’s perhaps a fault in our genesis. The genesis of landscape architecture as a profession is the idea of the garden. There’s a huge embedded relationship gardens have in our culture. Because of our over-intellectualising things and assuming that we know our genesis, we have actually forgotten our basis, and fractured it,” he rues.