Geschützt: Towards a communal multispecies ledger

Dear Pavan, could you walk us through your project and the core ideas that shaped its development?

CattleDAO takes the urban cow as its main figure around which an unrecognized network of care has organized itself in Ahmedabad. Gujarat’s anti-slaughter law criminalizes harm while legislating no corresponding duty of care. The result is that tens of thousands of bovines move through the city daily, sustained by the distributed labor, which has shown to be both gendered and caste-marked. The project reads this network as »people-as-infrastructure,« and asks what it would mean to inscribe it as civic standing rather than leave it as residue. It proposes a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) in which verified acts of tending accumulate into non-transferable reputations.

What drew you to work with blockchain structures in this project, and what new possibilities did this medium open up for you?

I approached blockchain as a territorial technique in the sense Bernhard Siegert gives the term: an operation that produces the order it appears to record. My interest was less in ledgers as records but more in ledgers as chains of operations capable of constituting, rather than merely representing, cows and their community of carers. I wanted to test a theory that a non-custodial, non-transferable register could encode Ostrom’s first design principle for a commons, that those whose labor sustains a resource are the ones who hold rights within it, at a layer no municipality or trust could unilaterally revise.

At what stage did blockchain become essential to your process, and were there moments when its use felt limiting, excessive, or conceptually challenging?

It became essential once I understood that visibility itself was the risk, in that verification reproduces surveillance. To make informal care legible through any existing civic channel is to submit it to an adjudicating gaze, which has historically consumed the very labors it pretends to recognize. A distributed register produces a witness that accumulates without classifying. The limitation was clarifying rather than disqualifying. The technology cannot, on its own, constitute the community that must hold it. I think that reoriented the project. Beyond constructing the ledger, the work is to defend the network the urban cow has already gathered.

How did the residency shape your practice? Could you reflect on what you learned and how exchanges with fellow participants influenced your work?

My earlier research treated architectural design as an operative instrument in the production of land, property, or territorial order. The residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude extended that method into a more computational territory: I thought of smart contracts as drawings. The cow’s daily passage across Ahmedabad traces a distributed cartography of tending that no municipal plan records. Exchanges with the participants and organizers helped me to sharpen the idea that infrastructural absence could be a counter-cartography around the bovine body for logging fodder, water, shade, and attention. I was able to hold the contradictions within the work rather than design around it.

What frictions, constraints, or questions were you aiming to explore or challenge through this project?

The constitutive friction concerns the Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act, among the strictest bovine protection laws in India carrying life imprisonment for slaughter, which legislates the cow’s sanctity while providing no corresponding infrastructure for her material care. But as I see it, this gap is productive. It conscripts informal caregivers into necessary but uncompensated labor that the state ignores. A second friction concerns authorship, as the carers who actually sustain the urban cow are precisely those rhetorically displaced from her story. The project insists on their return to the center.

How do you envision the trajectory of your project beyond the residency period?

The immediate trajectory is to move from simulation to situated practice and to pass the prototype on to the caregivers whose network it represents, and then let that encounter reshape what the system is able to recognize. On the longer horizon, Ahmedabad is not a singular instance, and other Indian cities sustain their own bovine-urban entanglements, each with its own configuration of invisible tending. My aim is to offer a shared structure/framework portable across contexts, so that in each city the cow remains the center around which her own commons is gathered.

What are your thoughts on the project’s long-term sustainability – both in technical terms and within a broader social or cultural context?

Sustainability, in this project, is a question of authorship before it is a question of infrastructure. The history of civic technology built in the name of marginalized communities is largely a history of capture. Instruments conceived as emancipatory often end in the hands of the institutions they were meant to displace. I am interested in CattleDAO as a social commitment: The caregivers whose relation to the cow constitutes this commons must be constituted as its governing body.

Barbara Cueto conducted this interview in collaboration with Sarah Donderer (Solitude Digital Cultures)