For Radhika Agarwala, Kolkata has always appeared as a living museum where inorganic and organic materials walk, breathe, and co-exist. Ancient architecture weaves with dancing banyan roots, and ecosystems grow within the fragmented concrete—those crevices, cracks, joints, and holes all resemble etched scars on a body. This inspired her, and during her walks, she found the tiniest rootless plants that mysteriously grow around this wilderness—'mosses'—to be an ancestral and immortal material in Kolkata's colonial history and the preservation of urban environments. These are the first living organisms to emerge on Earth, and with their resilient nature, they can grow where nothing else does, continuing to revive and restore themselves and their surrounding environments. They can help Kolkata, especially the planet, with two pressing issues: air pollution and rising temperatures.

For this residency, she became interested in fragility and permanence, restoration and repair, healing and caring. Can art become a catalyst for humans and the environment to communicate, consider, and co-exist within a conventional white cube space? Can nature be understood beyond aesthetic beauty, purpose, and ornamentation?

She started documenting and collecting specimens, growing moss and other plants that adapt well to built-up, ruptured landscapes. These were then kept in controlled temperatures and treated with hormones to allow the microbial wilderness to continue taking over. Gradually, she created living fossils and sculptures addressing climate change, time, memory, and history.