​Over the past 5 years, we have been unpacking the idea of collaborative socially engaged practices through our work with communities in the Chitpur area of Kolkata. This work has helped us challenge our own perspectives on the role of art in society.
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The first area of exploration has been the ‘why’- why do artistic practices need to be socially engaged, what affect can these practices have? Our work has helped us understand that when artists engage actively in society we can create a space for underrepresented narratives and in the process, change the existing narratives. We can also catalyze new interactions that shift existing hierarchies. We can change how people see their position and role in society. And enact possibilities of alternate futures.

​Written as a part of Sumona Chakravarty and Nilanjan Das's grant application to KHOJ International Artists Association

​Initially when 'Hamdasti' signaled me a ' go ahead' with my idea on photographs of prospective brides, I  was little hesitant. Hesitant because being a non artist, community based art was a completely new genre for me. Previously I worked as a journalist and research assistant. So had solid idea about framing critical question for individuals but getting involved in art practice was a new venture` altogether. Moreover only in recent times have people started to consider photograph as an art form. So other than its commercial value various interpretations and theories behind those pictures are now being discussed. Other than that, photographs are mechanical reproduction of reality. Therefore it involves technicalities. And to be frank I have little idea about it's technicalities.

My project required intimacy. It is more of a personal conversation with the subject (here the women) in the photographs. Along with the basic knowledge on photography, point of views from the other end of the spectrum (that is of photographers) was necessary as well. 
      
When I started to work on my project,  building a community of photographers and photographed seemed a distant reality . However constant workshops, sessions of brain storming, reading theoretical texts on photography and history gradually helped shaping issues to focus on.
 
I have some photos collected from different sources but those were not from Chitpur.  While going to that area and reaching out the local studios became a regular routine, collecting photographs and talking to women of that area on issues related to photographs of prospective brides became a major barrier. Finally a breakthrough came when I entered Paul Bari.

​As I could see, throughout these talk shows and personal interactions men and women both shared their thoughts and ideas about women as whole and it helped building a kind of shard space where issues related to womens' body, marriage and current notion about womanhood came into being.  
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These public and personal interactions helped constructing issues to harp on during festival. Meanwhile   I decided to use peepshow box as a medium to convey the crux of my search. Many people asked me why this particular medium. Here are the reasons
 

1. Peep shows are now obsolete and it can tickle adrenalin of ever nostalgic Kolkattaiyas
2. it has a voyeuristic element in it.
3. It somewhat blurs the idea of private and public viewing    

​First of all, I would like to thank the team of Hamdasti for including my project, ‘Courtyard (Uthan/Dalan): Activities and Social Structure’ as part of Chitpur Local 2 and giving me full freedom to explore, enquire and carry out this community led art and social practice project at Chitpur area. I would also like to thank the house-owners and their families, the neighbourhood people, the students and all the facilitators without whom this project wouldn’t have shaped up the way it is now.

I have split my reflections into 3 sections, first I will address the notion of why I chose the courtyard houses of North Kolkata, which were the houses and what was the process my project, (I will try to be as brief as possible)… then I will speak about the culminating event “Courtyard: Re-imagined” which was part of the Chitpur Local art festival held in February this year and lastly I will speak about the reflections in the form an exhibition, exhibited here at Max Mueller Bhavan.

On a quiet Sunday evening, with grey clouds threatening to wash out all the preparations, Srota and her team were setting up an event at the Pal Bari in Beniatola Lane. The discussion planned for the evening, in the courtyard of the magnificent house, brought together 3 photographers from the locality (all male) and 2 local residents (women) to discuss their experiences of photographing and being photographed. 2 of the speakers were members of the Pal bari as well, as Pal Bari had a long history of photography.
The large matrimonial portraits of women that formed the backdrop of the stage set the context beautifully. Without articulating it directly Srota was able to bring out a clear gender lens in the discussion. Initially some of the participants had been reluctant to discuss the politics of matrimonial photography and wanted to more broadly speak about studio photography, however the backdrop and Srota carefully designed questions brought out the politics very strongly. This to me was the biggest success of the event. By the end of the evening a rapt audience got completely immersed in a discussion on the changing expectations on women as wives, evolving notions on marriage and the man’s role etc. Some asked that the discussion be taken to wider audiences and made more direct in terms of its messaging. How the discussion and the engagement of the speakers evolves over the next iterations will be exciting to experience.
I was also relieved to see how the event had brought together many of the neighbours- the empty seats half an hour into the event were soon full, the tea and bodas were flying off the counter! It was comforting to see how engaging local residents had helped us to reach out to their neighbours. Srota's attempts to widen and deepen her engagement with people in the neighbourhood had paid off!

A few complicated and a few simple things to keep in mind for the next iteration-

• How can we build on the participation of the speakers and the Pal Bari? How do we balance the urge to reach new communities yet keep the project grounded by developing the existing relationships further?
• How can we consider the interests and motivations of the participants while designing the event?
• What do we hope are the outcomes? 
• Signs need to be bigger.
• Need envelopes for gifts.
• Napkins and water are a must, along with Cha and snacks :)

Art in Public Space: A Critical Reimagining took place in June in Bangalore, India. This four-day intensive lab was co-organised by Maraa and Primary, and brought together collectives from across India to share practice and take part in critical conversation around the politics of arts practice in public space. Here, Sumona Chakravarty from Hamdasti reflects on the gathering. 

While the workshop was titled ‘Art in Public Space’, the intent to rethink these words and imagining new ways of framing our practice was embedded in the impetus for this gathering from the start. As we listened to each other’s presentations over the first three days, there were as many points of departures as there were intersections across our practices. However to me there seemed to be a collective need to discard the notion that public space is central to our practice. In fact, by the end of the three days of presentations we gathered all the post-its generated by everyone and divided it into three categories – Practice, Publics and Public Space. It was proposed that we form groups and think through each of these larger themes, however funnily enough, nobody really wanted to think about public space as an entry point into framing our work.  It seemed too limiting and we needed a more layered, networked, interconnected framing.

In search of a more fitting starting point for our practice at Hamdasti, I substituted public space as an entry point with the idea of public moment. Looking back at the presentations from the other participants also reinforced this notion – it seemed to me that we were all in our own ways working to create a moment of publicness. Some by creating ritual space, or by realigning the relationship and movement of bodies in space, creating a new encounter, triggering friction, building a sensorial experience or a moment of play. These moments occur in public spaces but also in galleries, schools, homes workshops etc. For Hamdasti creating publicness translates to creating experiences where one can engage with the other and examine their relationship to a space in a new light. I strongly feel that its not so much our intent to place ourselves, our art or our practices (entity 1) in a public space (entity 2), but to work towards this publicness.
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Just as we found that creating a distinction between art (entity 1) and public space (entity 2) was unhelpful, the distinction between an artist and publics seemed equally obsolete as a way of framing our work. Instead of the artist-audience, artist-community binaries, we tried to imagine new models, describing a network of relationships and hierarchies between the different people involved in a project. This allows us to acknowledge the power dynamics, shifting roles and contending interests. It also prevents the artist from absolving themselves of any relationship to the people who encounter or engage with their work and hopefully encourages us to think more intentionally of these relationships and our role with respect to this network. This system often has the artist at the centre, but also leaves room for imagining new ways of collaboration and exchange between multiple individuals or groups involved in a project. It also challenges us to think about taking on different roles at different points of the project, and acknowledge the relationship between different people in the network outside the artist-audience relationship. It also helps us think of who is missing or left out of this network.

This post was published originally on the blog on Primary's website

As observed by Anuradha Pathak

Ruchira, the director of ThinkArts, works extensively with children, creating various kinds of performative events and experiences for the children of different age group through her own initiative. In her recent project with Hamdasti for the Chitpur Local -II, she is working closely with the students and teachers of Sri Bidya Niketan Girls High School. Her project started with making art as part of curriculum and generating a conversation amongst the girls and their grandmother and find out more about their surrounding and the bygone eras of their grandmothers. 

Initiating a dialogue with a community is to an extent still comfortably easy but continuing that aspect for long is a difficult task. Through various interactions with the students and their grandparents this barrier became more and more evident. She could speak to some students in groups from time to time but could not sustain a dialogue with the same  set of students, hence she planned her first intervention.    

29th April 2017 was her first intervention which was organized to bring the students and teachers under one roof, away from their school premise to make them think and experience their locality and about own family surroundings and generate a dialogue. The event was organized at the premise of the Chaitanya Library on Beadon Street in Sovabazar, Kolkata. Initially, doubts that the students won’t turn up at the venue did creep in when the schedule time for event was fleeting. Later, the students along with their teachers did come in numbers. Students from class V, VI, VII and even from Class X had come for the intervention.

The event started with the screening of Hamdasti’s film which was on various interventions, interactions and festivals that took place during Chitpur Local I. Since most of the screening was centered around the students of Oriental Seminary School it generated lot of interest amongst the girls as well as the teachers. 

​The intervention ended with filling up of a questionnaire where they were asked about how they envisioned their role in the project. In most of the responses, one aspiration was predominant and that was of taking on the role of an artist.  Later some of the teachers from Oriental Seminary School had also come and they also shared their experience with these students. 

The intervention ended on positive note that the students will continue to know more about their own locality and keep the dialogue with their grandparents going. The intervention was documented by the team Hamdasti and fellow artists involved in the project of Chitpur Local II.

Suhasini Kajriwal’s presentation was the first public event of Chitpur local’s present edition. The event took place in the morning of 22nd April and continued for around two hours. It was apparently a simple performative act of pulling a specially designed (hand pulled) rickshaw from one place to another. The larger purposes were firstly to observe how ‘the object’ and ‘activities’ around it influenced the public and secondly, perhaps a critique of hierarchy and value of labor in the society. 
In this event, it was important to observe that how a previously conceived idea or a work of art transforms and generates unexpected situations/reactions, while exposed to the larger public and space. There was some kind of shift in expectations and planning that Suhasini clearly realized during the event, and addressed several times. In spite of all, the work was successful, because it activated the space quite well and attracted many people for interaction, and in this way fulfilled the core reasons of a public art event.    
A local shop owner, who makes printing blocks, stamps, signage, and one of the collaborators in Suhasini’s project, was commissioned to make three dimensional cutouts like (metal) words. A hand pulled rickshaw was decorated with the words that form a few lines of a poem written by Rabindranath Tagore. Finally the poem took a ride on the rickshaw through streets and lanes of the locality.
In the beginning the rickshaw was stationed in front of the Oriental Seminary School for public viewing and especially for school children who were passing by at that time. Many school students were interested and spoke to the team members, and then their reactions were thoroughly recorded.  Later, the rickshaw traveled through nearby streets and narrow lanes. It was pulled intermittently by the artist, sometimes by the curious people on the street and members of the Chitpur local team. 
The intention of this event was to attract attention of people for interaction with the artist and the members of the team, to give them an idea about artistic activities in public space, also to get their reactions. The responses we received were not enormous in number, but considerable and some extent pleasing. There was curiosity among the people and many came forward to interact or expressed their view. These conversations clearly indicated that how people think about the place, their consciousness about the poet (Rabindranath Tagore) and his association with the locality and understanding of the poem, which was on display. It was also observed that people had a strong sense of ownership and pride about the place. Many among others showed eagerness for more activities like this one in the area. The whole environment was encouraging, because everyone was busy on the streets, in the shops, but was extremely tolerant and curious about our activities and we faced no annoyance from anyone.         
There were also various suggestions we received from different individuals on how to make the rickshaw more attractive, interesting and visible.  These responses were equally important, because it gave the impression that some kinds of interactive elements, like the use of sound or distribution of printed flyers would have been more helpful to activate the space and to get more attention from people.  We also received some feedback from different people on the language of the poem. It was in Bengali but we realized Hindi and English translations were needed because of linguistic verity in the area. 
The event went on smoothly for a few hours and finally ended around midday in front of Chaitanya Library. The whole process of the event was documented photographically and in other format by Ranadeep, Varshita and Chayanika.

The artists of Chitpur Local reflect on their first 4 months of engagement in the locality as they build community engagement and develop collective narratives. The video is the first of a series of collages which will track the progress of the projects over duration of Chitpur Local second edition, creating a common platform for reflection for the artists.
Camera and editing by Ranadeep Bhowmick

The video is composed of footage from the initial engagements in the locality and artists' responses to the following questions-

• Who are your collaborators, why did you approach them?
• What do you see as your role as an artist in this collaboration? 
• What are the principles you wish to follow when developing your engagement?
• What are the expectations of your collaborators from you?

Tomorrow we are kicking off the second edition of Chitpur Local with a workshop facilitated by Christine Ithurbide of UNESCO, that brings together artists, curators and academics to design a framework for measuring the impact of the arts.
It will also be the first opportunity for all the artists who have joined us for this edition to explore how far they can push their projects in terms of community engagement.

Here goes... 

Our biggest moment of validation, came three years into the project, when we went to share the profits (meagre yet comforting) of the products we had designed with Diamond Library, and the two brothers asked us to keep the money so we could continue future projects in the neighbourhood.
But this still did not help us answer the question we asked ourselves each time we are stuck on the road on our commute to Chitpur, or even enjoying the thrill of people engaging with our projects on the street. Why are we doing this? Is there a point? Do you think we are making any impact? 

These questions have found answers in small ways.

Last month, our one year of work at Chitpur came together for a weekend celebration. Here is a quick recap!

The Two Day festival
Day 1 (Friday) began with a walk guided by Calcutta Walks Explorer Iftekar Ehsan, who made this unfamiliar neighbourhood suddenly accessible to a new audience, and people were excited to see what the next few days had in store for them.
The event officially started with an inauguration by the students, at the school, who wrote their memories of their school on a small yellow tag and tied it to the gate. The school was the starting point for the event and visitors received a map and a guidebook to help them navigate the other events across the locality. Each visitor and participant was given the same yellow tag and they were invited to share their memories in different spaces across the locality and start articulating their new found relationship to this unexplored para.
The first event was a talk by the Centre for Studies of Social Sciences on local cultures like Bottla printing, Swang, charak and music. There was also a parallel film screening running at the same time.
The talk was not really a success as even though we had tried to design it as a storytelling session and an adda, it became too academic and hard to relate to. The films were challenging for the context, addressing homosexuality and gender identities in Jatra, but were surprisingly well received by the students, teachers and visitors.
After these inaugural events we launched the public art festival and visitors dispersed to visit the key  projects i.e. the pop-up museum, the memory game and the Diamond Library project. Each of these projects triggered an exciting range of interactions- between participants, audiences and the spaces of the locality. People had many questions for the  pop up museum contributors, some had fun talking to students and playing the games they had devised, the students came up with new demands from a visitors, suddenly creating feedback forms and comments books and posters, strangers bonded over the memory game and were prompted to explore the neighbourhood after, residents who were sceptical came down and started taking pictures, some spent several minutes looking at the plaques in the school or the books and the diamond library, some made suggestions about how to make it bigger and better the next time around!
Day 2- The day began with another photowalk, with walkers finishing their journey at the school and the public projects located around it. The conversations and interactions continued with a steady stream of visitors all through the morning. The students refused to work in shifts and stayed behind all day, enjoying their responsibilities and acting as organized guides and facilitators. It was great seeing the diversity of visitors and the members from the local community who kept dropping by to see the projects.
In the evening, the activities intensified, a street performance, designed to reflect Jatra aesthetics started the program of events. To our complete surprise just moments before it was about to begin a huge RSS procession took over the road, which people dressed in costume just like our boys, extolling the virtues of our Hindu National Culture. We took advantage of the crowd that had gathered in the wake of this procession and launched into our own performance. The performance to visitors across the neighbourhood to the many sites of the project, and ended at the Chaitanya Library, a historic neighbourhood landmark, where we were hosting an evening of music from the Chitpur region. Film makers Debojit Mazumdar and Anindya Banerjee had also come to screen their films at the school, and the visitors could choose to attend any of the events, and then walk around the neighbourhood to interact with the different projects, meet local community members, learn more from the students and explore the many local shops.
At 10 pm, as the last audiences at the film screening left and the students reported back with success stories and the adventures of the day, we finally declared wrap up! Everything came down in a fraction of the time it had taken to set up!
Over the two days the event had over 500 guests, with extensive media coverage over three days and the highest engagement ever on our Facebook page.