“I grew up exploring forests, naming trees, and spending long hours in my mother’s garden. That intimacy shaped how I learned to relate to nature,” says Tara Lal, the environmental conservationist and creative director behind the Aranyani Pavilion, Sacred Nature, South Asia’s landmark ecological art and architectural commission, now installed within the 16th-century Sunder Nursery gardens in the heart of New Delhi. Lal founded Aranyani in 2024 as a platform for ecological projects rooted in fieldwork, storytelling, and community-led restoration.
Aranyani is the name of a forest goddess referenced in the Rigveda, a sacred Vedic text composed over 3,000 years ago. “The fact that we once worshipped a forest goddess, and now barely remember her, is very telling,” Lal says. “When we stopped revering the feminine and the earth, we also stopped protecting them.”
Trained first as a designer and architect before studying Conservation Science at Imperial College London, Lal has spent years moving between disciplines and pushing back against their limits. At one point, she began a PhD, only to walk away. “I realised I was sitting inside a largely white, Western academic framework,” she explains. “I didn’t want to keep theorising nature from a distance. I wanted to be on the field, working with communities, learning from the land directly.”
That decision sits at the core of the pavilion’s premise: not nature as backdrop, but as something you move through, slow down with, and feel in your body. Titled Sacred Nature, the pavilion draws from Lal’s travels through forests and sacred groves, from the Anja Community Reserve in Madagascar to forest shrines in Togakushi in Nagano in Japan, and closer to home, Degrai Oran near Jaisalmer and the Mawphlang Sacred Forest in Meghalaya. “I noticed that these regions were all colonised,” Lal reflects, “and often, the only forests that survived were sacred groves. They endured because communities protected them”
The pavilion challenges dominant Western conservation models that treat people as a problem to be removed—introducing fencing laws, relocating communities, policing access—rather than recognising that local knowledge systems and communities who depend on the land have long sustained these ecologies as biodiversity hotspots.
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Mimicking the rhythm of a forest, the pavilion unfolds as a spiral path, conceived by Lal and designed by T__M.space, the young architecture practice led by Tanil Raif and Mario Serrano Puche, and built by Guillaume Lecacheux and the team at The Works. As visitors walk the spiral—one of nature’s recurring geometries, found in shells and storms, galaxies and the human psyche—the journey becomes a form of recalibration. “The pavilion is about movement, about wandering, and not arriving too quickly,” Puche says. At the centre sits a shrine anchored by a 5.5-foot soapstone monolith.
The structure is built from lantana wood, an invasive flowering species introduced to India by the Portuguese and later spread by the British, who brought it from Latin America to ornament colonial gardens. Over time, lantana spread aggressively across forest edges and commons, overtaking million of hectares and posing a serious threat to India’s forest cover. Fabricated by the Bengaluru-based, family-led team at Ekarth Studios, the plant is reworked here into a structural resource.
Above, a canopy composed of a cross-section of 40 native and naturalised Indian plant species—edible, medicinal, and culturally significant varieties including tulsi, neem, jasmine, marigold, and pomegranate — forms a living micro-habitat. It’s a subtle reversal of colonial botany: the invasive becomes the frame through which the native is allowed to return.
“In architecture, in design, even in how we live, we’re still grappling with colonial history,” Lal says. “The question is how to create models of repair, so healing becomes possible.” In many ways, the pavilion grows directly out of lessons learned through Aranyani Earth, the initiative’s restoration arm, across land and water projects: from reviving a 500-year-old well in Jaisalmer, to clearing invasive Prosopis juliflora and restoring native flora in the Aravallis at Chhatrasagar, to working with communities in Meghalaya to protect food cycles of cultivation and forage across more than 200 edible varieties.
In this sense, the pavilion becomes Aranyani’s most public proposition yet: a gathering point for ecological thinking that doesn’t lead with climate jargon, but translates restoration into an emotional experience.
“To build community, you need a physical place to gather,” Lal adds. “This is that place.”
The Aranyani Pavilion will be open from 4–13 February 2026 at Sunder Nursery, New Delhi, accompanied by a public programme of talks, performances, workshops and tours.
