Elephant in the Room

What happens when people uprooted from their land involuntarily uproot other animal’s lives? Is displacement of humans different from displacement of animals? Do elephant lives matter to a human whose life is at stake? Behind the scene, players are pulling their strings for the grand show that will shape the future. A crude future which has no place for ‘others’, where ‘humanity’ is a word deemed unnecessary.

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More than 700 thousand Rohingya people have taken refuge in Bangladesh since August 2017, fleeing the violence which began in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. Fleeing to save their lives, they settled in temporary refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Thousands of acres of forest land were transformed into red, barren earth within a few months to make way for numerous makeshift shelters which became home to hundreds of thousands of people. The largest site, Kutupalong-Balukhali, which shelters more than 600,000 people – the biggest settlement in the world – lies along one of the main migratory routes of critically endangered Asian elephants, who travel between Myanmar and Bangladesh. This area has seen many incidents involving human-elephant conflict, resulting in 13 deaths for a period of a year from September 2017.

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Elephant in the Room was a collaboration with people living in the camp through participatory art. For several months, we tried to develop a bond, a connection through making the elephants together and developing a unique friendship in the process. We have built life-size elephants with bamboo and old clothes to promote co-existence with nature and to raise awareness about elephant conservation among the community. In exchange for new clothes, torn clothes were collected from the people living in the camps that were turned into patchwork quilts (Kantha) sewn by the community women that were then used to cover the elephants.

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This project is an attempt to weave art, community practices, migrant experiences, trauma, and hope in a “kantha” which embodies the struggles of the stateless, be it human or animal, all over the world.

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Apart from the Kutupalong camp, the elephants were re-presented in the 18th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka and Dubai Art Fair, 2020.

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The collaboration could not have been possible without the continuous support of UNHCR and IUCN.

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*The work at the Kutupalong camp is under the UNHCR-IUCN partnership project “Biodiversity Conflict Mitigation around the Refugee Camp of Cox’s Bazar District”.