What Goa’s Food, Water & Communities Can Teach Us About Climate & Belonging

Wenceslaus Mendes, mapping and studying the Myristica Swamps with researchers and environmentalist (2026).

Every Goan holds dear memories of kalchi kodi. If you’ve been raised in Goa or a Goan household, the word is bound to ring a nostalgic bell.

And in 2024, Wenceslaus Mendes, a filmmaker, artist, researcher and a bona fide lover of all things Goa, decided to take his love for the staple a tad bit further by using it to christen the project he was working on, one that was awarded the Mrinalini Mukherjee Creative Arts Grant (2023-2024).

Elaborating on the project, Wenceslaus shares, "kalchi kodi — literally, 'yesterday’s fish curry' in Konkani — explores food as an embodied archive of ecological and community knowledge. Rooted in Goa’s fishing communities, the project looks at how knowledge of fish, water, seasons, ingredients and preservation is learned through touch, taste, smell, sight and sound.” 

He emphasises that the project considers cooking not simply as a culinary practice, but as a form of situated learning through which ecological memory is carried across generations. The work brings together oral histories, photography, film, sound, recipes, food practices and material experiments. “Through these encounters, kalchi kodi asks how the kitchen, the body and the landscape can become sites for making, sharing and transforming knowledge,” he explains.

While the project isn’t recent, it perfectly encapsulates the context of Wenceslaus’ work at the intersection of cinematography and community. At TEDxPanaji 2025: It’s About Time, Wenceslaus took the stage to speak about the dichotomy we inhabit.

Acknowledging that knowledge resides in our environment and in the wisdom of our elders, Wenceslaus emphasised the need to turn our gaze to climate change, which is threatening this valuable heritage.

He reasons, “Climate change is no longer something I encounter as an abstract environmental crisis; it is visible in the changing relationships people have with water, land, food and livelihood." This has pushed his work towards listening to communities experiencing these changes directly, making him increasingly interested in stories that connect climate with everyday life, memory, labour and inequality.

Wenceslaus Mendes at TEDxPanaji 2025

Is ‘modern’ simply knowledge that has been institutionally recognised? 

Have you ever heard about the khazans? 

Think of them as traditional lands in Goa reclaimed from marshes, protected by bunds that keep out seawater. They allow communities to farm and fish on the same land, supporting both farmers and fishers.

While Wenceslaus worked with an agricultural community in the khazans 2021 onwards, he encountered knowledge of tides, fish behaviour, seasons and winds. “Much of this knowledge was learned through observation, touch, repetition and being on the water, not through books, classrooms or formal certification. Yet when similar knowledge appears within an academic or scientific framework, it is often recognised as ‘modern’ or ‘legitimate’,” he shares. 

The interaction made him question whether modernity is really about newness, or about which systems of knowledge institutions choose to recognise. "Perhaps what we call modern is often simply knowledge that has acquired institutional authority," he observes. 

Much of Wenceslaus' work involves extensive research that investigates race and caste in India, exploring themes of discrimination, purity, labour and incarceration. In the course of time, his experiences introduced him to the concept of 'co-labour-abling'.

Understanding co-labour-abling

While making māti, a documentary film in Assam, Wenceslaus worked with riverine communities. 

“They were not simply 'subjects' of the film, but active participants in how the work was made. Their knowledge of floods, fishing, crops, embankments and living with displacement shaped what we filmed, what we asked, and how we understood the landscape."

To this end, the process was not about extracting their knowledge and translating it into a finished film; it was about working alongside them, learning through their practices and allowing their knowledge to alter the direction of the work. In this sense, co-labour-abling is about creating through shared labour, where knowledge, skills and decisions emerge through being and working together.

Beyond the field, the concept has made him question the artist’s position as an individual author. His role has increasingly become that of a listener, facilitator, researcher and participant within a larger network of relationships. "The work is not simply something I make about others, but something that emerges through working together with others,” he says.

This is where the interdisciplinary emerges.

Wenceslaus no longer sees filmmaking, photography, performance, installation or research as separate practices. Each gives him a different way of listening, observing and communicating. “Land, caste, labour, food, incarceration and ecology all reveal who gets to belong, who gets to use resources and whose knowledge is recognised. Sustainability therefore cannot be separated from questions of justice,” he emphasises.

Self-ethnography and documentation of traditional practices with community at Kaziranga, Assam.

‘You can’t freeze knowledge in the past'

One of his most crucial projects is Goa Water Stories, a community-led multimedia project documenting Goa’s diverse water ecologies, histories and the knowledge systems that have evolved around them. It brings together stories, memories, practices and lived experiences of water to explore how communities understand, sustain and negotiate their changing aquatic landscapes.

The project led him to one of the most important realisations: “Knowledge survives when it remains living, practised and capable of adapting to changing ecological realities.”

Looking back at his TEDxPanaji talk, he says his thinking has moved from preserving knowledge to understanding it as something living and continually evolving. “My work now focuses more on creating spaces where ecological and indigenous knowledge can be co-created rather than simply documented. I increasingly see this as a question of relationships and responsibility,” he shares. 

He’s seen a transformation in the way he approaches his work. His collaborations have become slower, more reciprocal and less extractive over the years. Goa Water Stories has particularly changed how he understands knowledge, as something held collectively across people, places, practices and ecologies. It has taught him to listen before he documents and to recognise communities as knowledge-makers, not sources of information. 

As a parting thought, he adds his hope that in the face of climate change, people understand that protecting knowledge also means protecting the people, lands, waters and relationships that allow that knowledge to exist.