Crafts from Waste

An introductory workshop for the Worli Koliwada community
This workshop was facilitated by G5A in collaboration with Samir Bharadwaj – a Mumbai based designer, photographer, and artist. The aim was to facilitate an alternate, informed perspective towards waste as a resource (dry waste in this case) and thereby shape awareness, attitudes and mindset towards the concept of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, eventually building ownership towards their own community, neighborhood and environment.

The process
Women and the participants from the community (children and youth) attended the workshop and built props for the production ‘Utterly Gutterly Atrocious’. All of them were at their creative best and came up with their own interesting ideas and materials to make the props. Around 90 different props were produced over a period of 10 days, right from shields, oars, rabbit headgears, masks, potty costumes, banners, publicity posters to name a few!

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The suffix to the name of this project says coming soon. The reason, I am unsure about the complexities of the politics that played out here. It wasn’t mine entirely this time. Yes I was working on field, yes I had experience in facilitation when I begun, yes I didn’t understand as much as I would like to, the politics of entering somebody else’s life and showing them a different perspective. Some would say my slightness could be misleading too. The point was, I wasn’t sure about a lot of things when it came to presenting this project in my "portfolio".

So I am going to leave this here, until I can process some of the following thoughts and have some clarity on the exceptions to a rule.

Beginning January 2018, I was working with a community, for the lack of better words, of people, and publishing this project would be allowing me to monetise myself, my work, my research by putting them as the case study. I wasn’t sure how okay I was with that. I wasn’t even sure if my conflict had enough reason to stand by itself, and if, in some subversive manner, was still othering them by thinking what I was.

This is a conflict that arises constantly in my head because the work I do is directly off and about people, and if they welcome it, for them too. But how do you take and intangible experience from somebody and monetise on that. How do you commodify this relationship by selling it as your forte of work. I’m still unsure.

Consent is one way of doing it I guess. You ask people if they are okay being showcased on your presentation wall. Sure. That’s one layer of consent, what happens when you’re asked about the project? When you give out the stories that were sacred to the experience? What then? How much of it needs to be shared and how much needs to be held back when it comes to people. I’m still unsure.

Then comes the challenge of presentation v/s representation. A large dialogue around how local we perceived them to be and how much that made us an outsider. How much are we intellectualising culture, relationships, life, and how much is too much? There is this conflict of whether presentations of community based projects should be banned.

Unsure about whether I did what I did with the right intention, and whether intention directly designs actions is questionable. Whether I knew for sure how what I did, said, behaved affected the kids. I wasn’t sure.

So for now, here is some of the communication and outreach done for the theatre production that was a culmination of the 4 months of workshopping done with the children, youth and women.