Library in the Forest Research Lab, growing from Kaziranga Forest and Wildlife Reserve in Assam, is invested in understanding the protocols of forest as a one-world philosophy, and in further developing them in accordance with the needs of our Age of Confusion. We now invite researchers, artists, and thinkers to take residency within this living archive.
Our lab operates on a simple premise: the forest thinks. Not as metaphor, but as a dense, distributed network of feedback loops, signaling systems, symbiotic codes, and adaptive algorithms – cybernetic protocols that have evolved over millennia. To learn them is not to extract data, but to enter into relation. To dwell within their logic is to encounter a philosophy that refuses the nature-culture split, offering instead a one-world framework where knowledge is always situated, embodied, and co-authored by more-than-human intelligences.
We ask how communities – indigenous, settler, migrant, forest-dwelling – co-produce the forest as a lived space, not merely a biophysical site. How do territorialities, mobilities, and contested land-use histories shape the cybernetic protocols we seek to learn? To read them is to read patterns of displacement, conservation violence, livelihood thresholds, and kinship economies. The residency thus treats Kaziranga as a relational landscape: a palimpsest of ecological and social strata, where human and non-human actors constantly redraw boundaries.
Kaziranga exists between land and water: the Brahmaputra’s shifting channels, seasonal floods that redraw trails, wetlands that breathe with the monsoon. How do settlements, paths, and practices adapt to periodic submersion? What forms of dwelling emerge when ground is never guaranteed? The forest’s signals are inherently amphibious: feedback loops pulse with rising and receding waters, and survival depends on reading the interval between dry and submerged. Residents are invited to study this watery logic as a model for living in an age of rising seas and erratic extremes.
Carbon, nitrogen, water, silt, seed, bone, plastic, pesticide: the forest ingests, transforms, and excretes. A metabolic lens asks: What enters the forest? What leaves? What accumulates? Who or what serves as processor, filter, sink, or leak? Residency research may trace nutrient cycles across root-fungal networks, or follow how waste from upstream towns settles in elephant corridors. Metabolism also means attention to labor: the work of decomposition, pollination, seed dispersal, and the often-unseen bodily toil of human communities who harvest, graze, or guard. To understand the forest’s cybernetics is to understand its digestion of the world.
Climatic unraveling, epistemic collapse, fragmented temporalities – demands we think across these registers. The forest does not separate geography from hydrology from chemistry. Neither will we.
The residency offers space for deep immersion: living alongside Kaziranga’s grasslands, wetlands, and woodlands; engaging with field ecologists, forest guards, community practitioners, and human geographers; mapping seasonal metabolisms; and contributing to the lab’s evolving toolkit – whether through artistic practice, philosophical inquiry, ethnographic fieldwork, or speculative design. In return, residents help refine the Library’s core question: How do we learn from a place, not just about it, when learning must account for power, water, and flow?
To reside in the Library in the Forest is to accept that you will be taught by wind, root, elephant trace, fungal signal – and also by flood lines, property boundaries, silt loads, and the slow digestion of rot. It is to practice humility before complex systems that are at once ecological, political, hydraulic, and metabolic. It is to join a slow, urgent, joyful investigation into what pedagogy becomes when the forest is both classroom and curriculum – and when the curriculum includes geography, amphibious life, and the endless work of material transformation.
