On April 26th our team of artists and the students set up an exhibition of the work developed through the workshops so far. During the week preceding the exhibition we met up with local residents, teachers and shopkeepers and invited them for the event, as well as sent home invitation cards with the students for their families.

Manuel Klappe, an art-historian and curator from Amsterdam, who was in Kolkata on a residency collaborated with us in designing this participatory event. It was on his advice that we created this giant map, linking it with red thread to spaces we had explored through the workshops and with yellow to possible future interventions. We also brainstormed about ways to create maximum participation and elicit the most frank feedback, and involve the students as key facilitators and planners.

We then facilitated a one day workshop with the students where we collectively created questionnaires for visitors. Each questionnaire was created by a team of four students, each with a specific role- writer, photographer, sound recorder and interviewer. Each team, selected one spot in the locality that they had explored during the workshops and created questions about the possible community based cultural events, installations and exhibitions that could be developed at these sites.

Then after post school preparations...

We were ready the next morning, with the students extremely excited about their new role as ushers, guides and interviewers.

Details about the feedback we got coming up in a subsequent post, but all in all everyone was extremely enthusiastic and we look forward to many such events in the future!

Above: an image of the playing field, where many students play cricket, at the Oriental Seminary. 

The Oriental Seminary is one of the oldest schools in Kolkata, located on Chitpur Road in the northern part of the city.  It has educated many important Bengali artists and public figures, Rabrindranath Tagore being the most famous.  The school is one of West Bengal's most important cultural and educational institutions, and continues to educate hundreds of school children today.  

We are looking forward to partnering with the Oriental Seminary and the West Bengal Heritage Commission in directing a project about the school, and its potential for physical and cultural restoration.  We have a planned a workshop with the Oriental Seminary's students, involving artists, curators, and architects, to discuss with students their ideas about heritage and the overlap between personal and collective histories.  Instead of working from a bureaucratic view of historic preservation, we hope to understand the community's needs, desires, and hopes for the physical infrastructure of the city.