Across Mountains and Memories: A Journey of Indigenous Solidarity





The High Altitude Exchange invites solidarity, listening, and learning across Indigenous communities, lands, and lineages in Nepal and Australia. Over two weeks, we engaged in conversations, studio visits, and site explorations with artists, activists, and community leaders who are shaping Nepal’s cultural landscape including preserving oral histories, continuing feminist wisdom, protecting sacred lands, and advancing gender and language justice.

At the Chumlung Office, we spent time with the @yakthungcho collective, who are reclaiming cultural memories through storytelling and protest, most recently by resisting a cable car project that threatens sacred land. Conversations with @artreenepal members and poet-activist @indu_tharu1 whose work has long engaged with community and land, sparked reflection on how artistic expression becomes a site for ancestral memorialization and acts of resistance. In Bhaktapur, our time with @aakrit_collective members deepened this dialogue, as we explored how migration, memory, and working-class lives shape and inform creative practice. 
With @alchemy_imprints we engaged with printmaking as a form of archival care, rooted in rural and agrarian narratives. We also visited @pre_yanka powerful solo exhibition, To All The Women Who Came Before Me, at Dalai La, a resonant tribute to intergenerational feminine histories.

In Mustang, @yungdungtsewang took us through a journey shaped by rituals, cosmology, and changing contours of the land under climate pressure. Back in Kathmandu, we gathered at Kala Kulo for two poignant conversations: one with @keepa.maskey on Newa feminist memory and care, and another with Ruksana Kapali on her multi-layered fights for queer rights and the politics of language justice. We ended our travels at Yantra House with @nyimdorj reflecting quietly on oral history and the slow, intentional work of archiving Highland Asia.

This exchange was shaped by mutual recognition and a commitment to listening across differences. We carry these conversations forward with the hope that their reverberations continue to unfold in meaningful, unexpected ways |

~~~




   Kalā Kulo |    info@kalakulo.org    |    instagram    ·    facebook    |    powered by cargo.site