Introduction

1If you were in London between November 2020 and July 2021, you might have stumbled upon some members of the hundred-strong elephant herd ranging through the city’s Royal Parks. These spectacular elephants were not flesh and blood but made from the stems of a flowering plant called Lantana camara and harvested in India. Lantana is actually an invasive species in India, brought as an ornamental plant by British colonists in the early 19th century. It thrives in forest ecologies affected by hundreds of years of colonial and post-colonial timber exploitation and forest modernization, and now acts as a significant threat to elephant habitat. Unruly lantana growth is a monstrous expression of plantation ecologies (see Münster, 2021). 

2The “Lantana Elephants” project is part of the Co-Existence campaign, a partnership between the UK conservation NGO, Elephant Family and The Real Elephant Collective, a not-for-profit, socio-environmental enterprise based in Gudalur, a town in the Nilgiris hills of India. The Elephant Family envisioned a grand travelling installation, a huge herd of life-size Lantana Elephants migrating across several continents to raise awareness about the current threats facing elephants and raise funds for conservation. As partners, the Real Elephant Collective designed and crafted these elephantine models.

Figure 1. Lantana bull among lantana plants.

3While media campaigns typically framed these elephants by highlighting the problem of habitat loss and human-elephant conflict, there are other ideas and processes behind their development worth foregrounding and which are relevant to understanding the complexities of what it means to live with elephants in the 21st century. 

Making real elephants

4Some of the Lantana Elephants stand up to 10 feet at the shoulder and, to a degree, recreate the impression of being in the presence of these giants. The dried and treated lantana stalks lend the models an organic quality and invite tactile engagement. The eyes are somewhat larger than regular elephant eyes and more forward-facing, a subtle anthropomorphic modification that The Real Elephant Collective team found helpful in facilitating visitor’s connection. 

5The Lantana elephants are not only life-size but also modelled on real-life elephants who range in Gudalur. An ongoing documentation and tracking research of elephant movement in the area by The Shola Trust, a partner NGO, has allowed The Collective’s designers to create portraits of these nonhumans. Some of these elephants are familiar only to conservation groups, others are regular travellers through certain tea gardens, while a few individuals are wildly famous among the public: celebrities with their own names and admired personalities (such as the Nilgiris local hero, Nadodi Ganesan).

Figure 2. Nayar inking a Lantana elephant design.

6The Lantana Elephants have histories and biographies. The Real Elephant Collective Team wrote detailed backgrounds for some of these individuals. These biographies can help visitors imagine these lantana models in vital and nuanced ways, and regard them as more than merely representative of an animal or a species. While it is not unusual for BBC documentaries to use personality to make wildlife engaging, the stories of Lantana elephants are not just a narrative device. They are characterisations that capture the idiosyncrasies of local bulls and herds who live in a certain place and are a testament to a relationship they share with local people. They are individuals that have become known through repeated observation and interactions, portraits of elephants only possible from the intimate familiarity that comes with sharing a landscape with them. Lantana elephants are representations of more-than-human persons that need to be understood within the context of their ongoing ecological, social, and interpersonal relationships with humans in the Nilgiris. 

7Despite the static nature of these model elephants, visitors frequently comment on the uncanny sense of movement evoked by the body. This is surprising given the restrictive material nature of skeletons made from iron and an epidermal layer crafted from dried lantana. Depictions of action are subtle: the characteristic elephantine tilt of the head, curl of the trunk, or a raised back leg. The most powerful sense of animacy emerges not from the body positions but from the “flow of the sticks”—the fluid lines that give form to the elephant’s body.

Figure 3. Crafting a Lantana elephant foot.

8Learning to work with and exploit the possibilities of lantana in this manner was a process of skilled craftsmanship that developed over time as more elephants were made. Coordinating with the designers who drafted models of each animal is a group of men and women who labour to weave together iron and wood and give form to the Lantana Elephants. These members of the Real Elephant Collective are adivasi and from the Kurumba and Paniya communities—peoples indigenous to the Nilgiris. Many of these people come from families and villages whose livelihoods are in close relation with forest landscapes and their nonhuman inhabitants, including elephants (for example, see Bird-David, 1999)

9To understand how the Lantana Elephants are imbued with animacy that seems to exceed the limits of their static materials requires grasping the role of the indigenous craftspersons. Making elephants is a creative process. These artists do not simply follow a design but are invested in bringing forth an individual with a unique character. The flow of the sticks seems to capture the lines and musculature of the elephantine body and reveals a familiarity with how these animals look, feel, and move. The capacity to capture elephants in this way is a talent that possibly results from the fact that these indigenous peoples have a history of living in proximity to wild elephants.

The tensions and politics of co-existence

10Through their sheer size, power, and intelligence, wild elephants are potentially dangerous. Being in the presence of elephants requires people to take care; they affect and transform how people use space. Walking among the herds of lantana giants in the royal parks of London might give some sense of the formidable nonhuman agency that people who live near elephants are subject to. Perhaps it seems out of place or unreal that these archetypal wild beings have been transplanted into spaces like London, with herds temporarily co-opting its quaint urban parks. 

11However, this overlap of human and wildlife worlds is neither aberrant nor impossible—the installation calls attention to the reality that people and elephants do actually live together in such a manner. In places like Gudalur, elephants will regularly roam among tea gardens and densely populated human habitats and, by doing so, interrupt how people use that space. Interspecies co-inhabitance with such a formidable being is a mundane occurrence for many in India. 

Figure 4. Adivasi craftsmen escorting a finished elephant.

12Hopefully, this also reminds people in London that the urban park was once shared territory with their own wild animals and may well be again. If people can live with such a large and potentially dangerous animal on a daily basis, it may not be such a big leap for those living in London to invite animals back into their worlds. Lantana elephants can inspire an openness to rewild. 

13If there were a soundtrack that accompanied this travelling installation of Nilgiri elephants in the UK, it would not necessarily be the sensual sounds of the nonhuman jungle—this is the fantasy of the untouched wilderness. Instead, we would hear elephant rumbles accompanied by the sounds of people, whether it is the excited chatter of observing crowds and the artificial clicks of mobile phone cameras or the anxious shouts of farmers attempting to frighten elephants away from agricultural plots. Sharing space with such an animal can be a tense and exciting encounter, but as we found with the story of celebrity Ganesan, some elephants and people have learnt to tolerate and live passively alongside each other.

14In Gudalur, despite seeing elephants on a regular basis, people are still captivated by these giants. The same farmer intensely frustrated with elephants eating their crops will also happily engross themselves for several hours, watching elephants feed, play, or give birth. Elephants interrupt life in negative and positive ways. Co-existence is multi-faceted and complicated. It can be violent and caring, accommodating or in conflict. The Real Elephant Collective found that for visitors to the Lantana elephant installation in Kerala, India, the life-size models have the capacity to evoke a variety of stories, feelings, and memories of encounters with elephants.

15The Lantana models are possessed by some of that charismatic elephantine power and demonstrate how many humans around the world share a connection with these nonhumans. It is this seemingly universal magnetism of elephants that enables their “cosmopolitan” quality—they are beings who can “forge connections across difference” (Barua, 2014: 560). Elephant bodies are enacted in diverse ways, and their meaning and form can vary depending upon the cultural context through which they travel. Audiences in the UK perceive wild elephants through colonial-inspired stories of exotic Otherness and wilderness, stories through which they approach and are charmed by the installation. 

Figure 5. Lantana herd at the water’s edge.

16Referring to a previous migrating Elephant Family exhibition—Elephant Parade—Barua argues that through the elephant’s cosmopolitanism, these models can “[generate] concerns about conservation” (Barua, 2014: 8) and reconfigure relations with animals, people, and landscapes in distant places. The Lantana Elephants ask more of its British audience than their conservation awareness, concern, and funds. It also asks people to recognise and inherit the problematic story of this invasive species that connects the society and ecology of India and England. Lantana camara was able to colonise elephant habitat because forest was cleared for tea gardens and teak plantations to build tea chests, all products to be sent to England at the time. Environmental modifications under British colonialism are deeply implicated in the current endangered status of the Asian elephant and “human-elephant conflict”. Even the personal, political, and consumer choices that people in the UK currently make in their daily lives can have detrimental environmental effects in other countries. 

17The problems of “conflict” cannot be solely located at the margins of society, at the boundary of forest and field, at the embodied juncture of rural farmer and elephant. There are broader social forces that have structured and continue to make co-existence with elephants in these spaces difficult. Hopefully, meeting some of the travelling Lantana herd members presented an opportunity for people who live in urban and global centres of power to reflect on their troubling and complicated interconnection with these distant places and come to a better understanding of the problems that Asian elephants—and the humans they live alongside—are currently facing.