Mahato, Mita: Arctic Play

Arctic Play is a drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book. Mapping an Arctic imaginary of beings and landforms onto a shifting stage of woven and layered papers, Mita Mahato conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows.

Mita Mahato is a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Building on the long tradition of cartoonists who direct the medium’s unique juxtaposition of word and image toward political and social reform, her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials—old newspapers, obsolete maps, junk mail, packaging scraps—in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism. Her poetry comix have appeared in places including Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades and listed in The Best American Comics of 2019. Her work has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. Her mother was Prem, born in Bihar. Her father was Basanta, born in Bengal. She currently lives in Seattle.