Taktyk – Reservoirs, guardians of water in India

In November 2025, the Taktyk office will have a double presence in India: in Ahmedabad, for a conference, exhibition and publication at CEPT University, and in Mumbai, where it will speak as a keynote speaker at the Asia–Pacific Regional Congress of Landscape Architects.

Two events, two ways of addressing the same question: how can we rethink our relationship with water and the territories it shapes?

Telling the stories of water differently

Under the title Reservoirs, the Guardians of Water, Taktyk invites a shift in perspective.
In an overheated world, where ecological crises accumulate and repeat themselves, how can we continue to talk about water without reducing it to a mere endangered resource?

For Taktyk, the landscape is a living narrative. Through this project, the studio proposes to observe the architectures of water—whether natural, spontaneous, or constructed—as spaces of relation: between humans and non-humans, between function and symbolism, between the visible and the invisible.

Here, reservoirs become guardians of an ancient bond, where water is no longer just a flow, but a memory, a meeting place, and a space of transformation.

Two sources, two stories

The installation  and publication presented at CEPT University in Ahmedabad juxtaposes two stories of water, two geographies, two ways of inhabiting a landscape:

• In Brussels, a spring quietly resurfaces in the duck pond of the Abbey of La Cambre, revealing the trace of a forgotten urban valley—a memory of the landscape before the city.
• In Vadodora, India, an ancient sacred reservoir—once a site of devotion and gathering—has been transformed into an irrigation basin for a golf course.

These two films, projected face to face, are accompanied by a cartographic and sound installation.

On a third wall, field photographs and sensitive cartographies convey the depth of the work carried out in Brussels and India.
The voices of the two sources intertwine in a sound composition that weaves a dialogue between the places—as if the water itself were telling its story.

With the support of Wallonie-Bruxelles International’s mobility and promotional creation grant.