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Title
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Carrying the landscape in upper Mustang, Nepal
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Description
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This photograph of two people walking back from the fields to the stone houses along the red cliff band captures everyday movement in Upper Mustang, where rural livelihoods are inseparable from steep terrain, fragile ecologies, and histories of adaptation to environmental uncertainty. Mountain landscapes are actively sustained through embodied labor and intergenerational knowledge. Footpaths, stone walls, and cultivated plots together form a landscape shaped as much by agricultural practice and seasonal mobility as by exposure to climatic variability and other disruptions. I am interested in how agrarian change in mountain regions unfolds through gradual shifts in, for instance, altered cropping patterns, labor scarcity, changing access to land and water, and local politics. At the same time, Upper Mustang is increasingly framed through narratives of risk: landslides, drought, glacier retreat, and infrastructure-led development intended to mitigate or bypass these vulnerabilities. This image situates disaster not as an external shock, but as something negotiated daily through livelihood practices that quietly carry the landscape forward, even as ecological and political conditions might be unstable.
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Date
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2025-12-12
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Creator
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DiCarlo, Jessica
