Collaboratively Reimagining Spaces Through Socially-Engaged Creative Practices

Abstract

In November-December 2022, Khoj, a not-for-profit contemporary arts organization based in New Delhi, India, presented a bilingual exhibition (Hindi and English), “Threading the Horizon: Propositions on Worldmaking through Socially Engaged Art Practice”. The stimulus for this paper comes from the encounter with the fourteen research-driven, community-based projects curated at the gallery. In particular, I explore ‘the how and why’ of five artists/activists and their three projects – how they intervene in the everyday experience of negotiating violence through invisibilities, rights, inequality, and leisure by women and gendered others in the capital city, how the projects in the gallery act as sites of conversation and reflection, and why is it significant to delve into the everyday urban and digital context in which these projects unfold. The artists’/activists’ site-specific placemaking interventions are characterized by transformative processes that emerge from their close, long-term engagement, dialogue, and collaboration with participating communities and other artists/curators/designers. The first project is 5 Bigha Zameen (1 Acre Land) by the architect and artist/activist Swati Janu in collaboration with the Social Design Collaborative. The year-long project, based in Yamuna Khadar, Delhi, sought to actively support the women farmers’ rights to lives and livelihoods on the floodplains of the Yamuna River. Fursat ki Fizayen (Spaces for Leisure) by the spatial design practitioners Divya Chopra and Rwitee Mandal emerged from the leisure experience of women in Madanpur Khadar, an urban village in South Delhi. Rarely seen occupying public spaces for leisure, women reclaimed a small terrace to sit and have tea together – women whose lives were occupied mainly by household responsibilities and work outside. The third community-based project is Aao, Jagah Banaye! (Come, Let’s Make Space!) by the co-founders of City Sabha, Saleha Sapra and Riddhi T. Batra. It sought to empower informal women vendor groups in Raghubir Nagar, New Delhi, facing spatial injustice in an everyday context riddled with deeply-entrenched patriarchy. Drawing on de Certeau’s understanding of “the procedures of everyday creativity” and a Lefebvrian framework to look at spaces, the qualitative study examines women’s (artists/activists’ and the communities’) endeavours to (i) resiliently (re)imagine Delhi as an urban setting; (ii) (re)claim public spaces for leisure, and (iii) (re)configure real and online spaces (on Instagram) through the entanglements of socially engaged creative practices with quotidian experiences. The paper emphasizes the complex power relations between the artists/activists and their communities/collaborators, the bonds of care and compassion formed in and through the projects, and how they can carry forward during the various production, curation and exhibition processes. It raises the following questions: (i) How can tracing the artists/activists’ entangled praxis with diverse everyday environments and the alternative production of urban/rural, physical/online spaces and imaginaries help us expand our understanding of socially engaged creative practices? (ii) How may the artists/activists pay attention to their human collaborators and the non-human environment to create more inclusive projects, develop nuanced ways to strengthen their voices, and share their collective ideas and experiences?