Niv has a school at Delhi’s satellite city Noida, the location of the school is in between village and city. The nearest public school to the village is four hours driving away, and most of the parents in the village couldn’t afford the intuition fee, therefore, lots of parents gave up sending their kids to schools. Niv school filled up this need, providing free and basic education for kids from the village. The kids who study there are aged from 8 to 14, and graded into three classes. The main courses are Hindi, English, Math, Science, Social Science and Art.

I was born after the “Made in Taiwan” era, so the memories of farmland only occurred in grandparents’ places and their generation. For those like my grandparents that underwent the era of “Made in Taiwan,” leaving the village means they can catch up with the new economic boom and live a wealthy life. By then, there were a lot of small communities popped up between village and city, which are gathered by teenagers who left the village but yet couldn’t afford the lives or buying houses in the city. These communities are far from the village, but not too far that ones can still reach the farmland if they want. So on holiday the parents would take their kids back to the village to visit their farmer grandparents. But for the kids, this conceptual distance is still there, when it comes to the timeline, they know better about when a video game is coming out than when we can harvest the rice spike.

Some experts predict in the coming half century, India as economically fast growing country will have a huge impact on the world. When I see these Niv School students and notice they are going to catch up the wave of “Made in India,” I wonder what kind of a future is waiting for them, where will they go, and these kids from the villages, what will be the changes on these farmer kids and their farm land?
In this work, I use some waste fabric that I got from the cloth factory, and invite students from Niv school to collect materials they can find in the farmland. We held a workshop together about weaving a flag of the memory and the link between the kids and the land. After the exhibition, the flag will be buried under the playground of Niv school. Until 2050 when those kids become the core of the society and we will get the flag out again.

(This is a rough translation of the original in Chinese)