'A Dialogue', founded by Prerna Garg, begins with a simple but rigorous premise: that the identity of a place is shaped through the relationships between people, plants, animals, and the environment they inhabit. The work is rooted in traditional ecological knowledge, ie. systems built over generations through observation and asks how these systems can be understood, documented, and translated today.

The project took shape through extended field immersion across regions in India, where Garg and her collaborators spent time living with communities, learning directly from local practices. Early research engagements included work in the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve, where they contributed to the creation of People’s Biodiversity Registers (PBR). This involved working with Baiga communities in villages such as Chhaparwa, Bindawal, and Tilaidabra — settlements without electricity or connectivity. In these villages, the PBR process required engaging local residents to record their own ecological knowledge, like what grows where, which plants are edible or medicinal, how seasons affect availability, and how the land is used across the year.

In places that do not appear on formal maps, this becomes one of the only structured records of biodiversity. The team worked with forest dwellers who rely on subsidised grain for food security during monsoon months, while continuing to depend on forests for fuel, materials, and food. The relationship between community and ecology is direct and constant, and this is reflected in how knowledge is shared across age groups and embedded in daily life.

In regions like the Banni grasslands of Kutch, A Dialogue’s work looks at how a landscape shaped by tectonic shifts and changing river systems sustains diverse grasses, animals, and migratory birds, and how pastoral communities continue to adapt to salinity, heat, and water scarcity. In Chanderi, the focus shifts to pond ecologies and the way local food cultures depend on their respective from soil, climate, and plant life.

A significant part of their work centres on traditional ecological knowledge around food. This includes documenting wild edible plants, including roots, greens, berries, mushrooms, and understanding how communities identify, harvest, and use them across seasons. The act of foraging is treated as both sustenance and knowledge transmission, where recognising variations in plants, seeds, and soil becomes a way of reading the land. In many regions, these plants are still used daily, while in others, they are fading from use despite being nutritionally and ecologically significant.

All of this research is brought into public-facing formats through curated experiences — dinners, installations, and gatherings — where ingredients, techniques, and stories from specific regions are presented together. Projects like Dhanau, developed for the India Art Fair 2025, draw from the ecology of western Rajasthan, working with seasonal ingredients, material forms, and local techniques to reflect the interdependencies within that landscape. The experience unfolds as a journey, with each element from ingredients, and preparation methods, to presentation linked back to ecological relationships. In North 24 Parganas, Sundarbans — Translation 05, their research from West Bengal was developed into a culinary experience at the opening of Raw Mango. Their fieldwork here included visits to temples, local vegetable and flower markets, the central herbarium in Kolkata, and villages across the Sundarbans region, building an understanding of how ecological knowledge is shaped through culture and everyday practices. Flowers, especially hibiscus, became an important visual reference point here, reflecting their presence in temples and their association with the goddess Kali.

Alongside field research, A Dialogue explores how contemporary tools can support biodiversity work. Their investigations include the use of drones for mapping landscapes, sound recording to study ecosystems, and blockchain for tracing food systems. These approaches sit alongside a broader question of how technological and cultural shifts can influence conservation. Their work engages with larger environmental challenges such as invasive species, including the spread of lantana across Indian forests, and the impact of climate events like floods and droughts on biodiversity.

Across all of this, A Dialogue operates as an ongoing research practice. It moves between forests, grasslands, farms, and cities, building an archive of ecological knowledge while testing ways to carry it forward. Their dinners are curated with a much larger creative vision than culinary practices alone, grounding their work in the idea that biodiversity goes beyond species, into a network of relationships between a land, its people, and the systems they sustain together.

Follow A Dialogue here.

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