• The exhibition KaBhumM!!! at the Kerala Museum has turned lived realities of tidal flooding into artistic evidence for action.
• Workshops held at the exhibition help build disaster preparedness among affected communities. Carpenters, electricians and other experts train audiences to keep their homes safe from flooding impacts.
• While funding remains a challenge, organisers envision conducting regular tide audits, and long-term workshops for building resilience.

In many low-lying wards of Ernakulam district, Kerala, the day begins with high tides flooding homes. Salt creeps through cracks in the floor, into water in wells, corrodes meter boxes and woodwork, and forces residents to lift bedding and electrical fittings to higher areas. Children paddle barefoot through ankle-deep brine to school. The tide is no longer an occasional visitor for thousands of families.

These are not the sudden floods that make headlines. These are slow, repetitive incursions of sea water that wear down furniture, livelihoods, and patience alike. Sea level rise, local subsidence, canal siltation, ill-planned reclamation, and overstressed drainage systems together lengthen high tides, allowing slack water to linger for hours. Experts call it high-tide flooding or tidal flooding.

Urged by this quiet crisis, artists, scientists, and residents in Kochi have formed an alliance to raise awareness and spur action. They translate tide charts into choreography, telemetry into murals, and household repair into a collective ritual. These are displayed at KaBhumM!!!, a museum project at the Kerala Museum in Edapally.

The stage that floods

The artistic movement did not begin in a gallery, but rather in flooded squares and courtyard stages. Traditional Chavittu Natakam troupes adapted theatre to tell the story of the sea, performing in flood waters. On a monsoon evening in Vypin, an island in Kochi city, actors staged Thirike Varunna Kadal (The Returning Sea) on a flooded square. As drums rolled, performers stamped through ankle-deep water and chanted an actual tide reading from a local tide pole: “Willingdon, one point six metre, 23rd July, four in the morning.”

Performances end with practical learning. Carpenters show how to raise furniture above floodlines. Electricians demonstrate how to isolate meters safely. Repair ateliers are erected on the square so residents can practise under supervision. After one show that named a blocked drain, municipal workers cleared it. “That was our encore,” said troupe leader Joseph Felix.

The exhibition that archives lived realities

Curated by artist and activist Radha Gomaty, the idea for KaBhumM!!! grew out of months of fieldwork in Ernakulam’s tidal panchayats. “While science speaks of recurrent tidal inundation, people see salt crawling up their walls and taste it in their wells. We wanted art to translate that vocabulary of loss into a language of empathy,” said Gomaty.

The exhibits explore the lived experiences of tidal flooding in various formats. Photographs suspended in jars of seawater erode slowly, conveying the erosion of homes by saltwater intrusion. A mixed installation of drawings, video and clay tell the story of a child listening to the sea through her bedroom wall. Verses of Ardhanareeswara Stavam (a Hindu hymn) play over videos on flooded streets and faces. “It reminds us that what we divide will one day merge again,” an elderly visitor said.

Data from tidal charts was depicted artistically in one exhibit, while another by schoolchildren displayed tide maps from recycled materials. Visitors were invited to dip their fingers into seawater and write what the word “tide” meant to them – responses included home, loss, memory, return, and so on.

“Consent is everything,” said Gomaty. “Every mural, oral history and recorded tide has to be owned by the person who lived it.”

The exhibition partnered with Resilient Kochi and EQUINOCT, organisations that map flood risks and promote citizen tide monitoring. “Every flooded courtyard is both a data point and a story,” said C.G. Madhusoodhanan of EQUINOCT, who has been researching tidal flooding for years. “Art helped us connect the two.”

Turning art into action

KaBhumM!!! goes beyond art to invoke action. Scientists have taught residents to install bamboo tide poles and photograph readings with dates. Volunteers collate these images, while designers turn the logs into zines and posters showing which rooms flood at what height. This co-production of observation and design is called an evidence ecology. “When 70 homes show repeated flooding at 1.5 metre, the conversation changes from anecdote to plan,” said Madhusoodhanan.

Sound artists have recorded the acoustics of water in basements and played them during municipal meetings, while musicians have recast devotional hymns into safety instructions that transcend literacy and age gaps: at 1.4, unplug the board; at 1.6, move the children.

The exhibition also hosts roundtables for policymakers and enables sharing of petitions for action. Workshops are held on techniques that reduce household short circuits. Citizen logs have already been used to prioritise desilting in several wards. When planners see a mapped cluster of houses that flood at the same tide metre, the case for engineering intervention gains weight.

“When people create and interpret their own data, that data becomes agency. And agency, over time, becomes resilience,” said K.G. Sreeja of EQUINOCT. Regarding the organisation’s weather monitoring system, she added, “Our platforms are open-source, transparent and co-created with local communities. By making climate data a common good, we ensure that resilience is not trapped behind proprietary tools. It grows organically wherever it is needed.”

“Official gauges are invaluable,” said Madhusoodhanan, “but they miss micro zones of risk. Community telemetry and dated photographs become evidence that authorities can no longer ignore.”

The results are many small victories. A fisherman in Fort Kochi who had recorded the level of the highest tide in 2019 saw the panchayat dredge a blocked culvert after students painted a new blue band for recent levels and posted photographs. A sound-walk in Panampilly Nagar that recorded metallic echoes of water in a basement changed a councillor’s understanding – what had been recorded as rainwater-logging in official files was now seen as sea intrusion.

A future envisioned 

Organisers hope for regular tide audits where artists curate the year’s incidents, residents present logs, engineers explain timelines and councillors commit to follow-ups. They envision open measurement platforms that combine LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) maps with community data, public sticker templates, zine patterns and play scripts that any ward can replicate.

In order to make these a reality, funders and institutions must change their timelines. While short-term exhibitions are easier to finance, it is the long-term repair workshops that build local capacity. Practitioners require funding that can cover training, storage of archives and repeated exhibits and performances. Kochi’s experiment matters beyond its shores. Other deltaic and coastal cities face the same slow violence. The lesson is transportable. When local knowledge, simple telemetry, arts of translation and institutional hooks are combined, action is spurred.

First published by Mongabay India on December 10 2025.