Tending is a film and sound installation, following shifting conditions of childhood, land, and climate crisis in the Rolwaling Valley, sitting in the shadow of one of Nepal’s largest and most precarious glacial lakes: Tsho Rolpa.

The installation explores the evolution of spatial-sonic relationships with the environment as landslides, floods, and glacial melt accelerate at an unprecedented degree. Here, child monks play with rocks in a swept riverbed. A 13-year-old girl returns to her village to help her grandmother after a landslide, translating ancestral memories of previous ones. Buddhist prayer flags criss-cross a split mountainside, wearing off the possibility of future disasters. In the Rolwaling Valley, the climate crisis is neither an abstract concept nor a news headline. It is an acute and lived reality.

From a series of vantage points, the installation explores how sound and space accumulate in intensifying climate risk, one registered at the scale of the mountain valley, village, and body. Against the backdrop of intensifying floods, landslides, and avalanches in Nepal, the film explores what it means to stay for people living with this risk. What does it mean to tend to the land on which you stand? And, how do we collectively tend to a planet in crisis? A panel discussion will follow the screening. It will collect voices from scholars, organizers, media artists, and environmental specialists to explore the idea of tending in terms that are spatial, sensory, political, and environmental.

A panel discussion following the screening will bring together scholars, organizers, media artists, and environmental specialists to explore the idea of “tending” through spatial, sensory, political, and environmental perspectives.