ADMA 2025-2026

Essayistic Comics as a Tool in Urgent Times 

Confronted with the planet approaching its limits, dominant economic models continue to commodify and extract human and non-human nature. Amid the ongoing crises of genocide, climate disasters and rising authoritarianism, this research asks: How should the stories of these urgent times be told? 

While cycles of violence and social change are not new, we now stand unprecedentedly close to planetary collapse. This research looks at existing theoretical frameworks to explore how such urgency can be conceptualized in generative ways and acted upon through narrative and aesthetic means. Specifically, this art-based project investigates how essayistic comics can resist the erasure of marginalized histories, experiences, and voices.

Part of this inquiry started in 2022 under Veditum India Foundation's Moving Upstream fellowship, a program documenting Indian rivers through the slow practice of walking. Following this methodology, I walked along the banks of the Sindh River and gathered drawings, notes and recordings of encounters with the river and its people. Now, with temporal and geographical distance from the initial encounter, I retrace my steps along the river through a deep re-engagement with the material archive and my own memories. Employing reflection as an ethical practice, this project makes visible the documentary process, with all its inherent gaps and situated knowledge. It does so by combining the non-linear narrative and reflexivity of the essay form with the visual immediacy of comics. Beyond documentation, these essayistic comics will serve as a method of thinking-through-making. They will help explore how caste, patriarchy and religious nationalism establish hierarchies that govern river access, sand and labor extraction, and vulnerability to climate-induced flooding.

While essay comics offer significant potential for narrative and aesthetic innovation, they remain underexplored in both form and content. Therefore, this research will also examine how essayistic comics convey urgency aesthetically and narratively, questioning whether urgency necessitates speed or can embrace slowness. A more ambitious aim is to develop a theoretical and practical framework for both creating and critically examining ‘essayistic comics' and the ‘aesthetics of urgency’. 

Poorva Goel

Tracing River Sindh

Water Colour and Ink

Brussels, 2023