"Sarsuna Theke Jana" is a collaborative arts, ecology, and community program encouraging participants to map the aesthetics, culture, and biodiversity of their local neighborhood. Focused on fostering dialogue and understanding, it addresses cultural differences, migration, climate chaos, and biodiversity loss. Through art interventions, it integrates questions of cultural identity, community, ecology, and a "DIY approach," promoting intercultural understanding and exposing communities to diverse ideas. Spanning 4kms, the 2016 project under Chander Haat's residency required intricate transportation between venues.

Concept Note
A public art festival in Sarsuna, Kolkata 9th-10th June 2016

"An urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and eeconomic factor, but also by the image that its inhabitatnts and thise of other neighborhood have of it." - Chombart de Lauwe.

An arts, ecology and community programme that asks people to map the aesthetics, cultural and biodiversity of their local neighbourhood. Working in collaboration with artists, participants are brought together in an exploration of people and place. The programme aims to increase dialogue within and between communities about the impacts of cultural differences, migration, climate chaos, biodiversity loss and the destruction of habitat, to breakdown negative cultural stereotypes and strengthen intercultural understanding.

The communities share a history, culture and common language- as well as a relative ease of basic subsisitence that permit one to move beyond question of political identity as a point of departure in the development of art interventions. The aim of this project is to stilulate the local and wider audience to consider how they can integrate question of culture identity, community, natural resources, ecology and a " DIY approach" into their own practices while also exposing the regional population to outside ideas and information.

As suggested by Paik, that 'noise' occurred in two-way communication, and mistranslation was aslo a way to delivering messages. Within this susutem, Paik gave equal importance to both the role of sender and that of the receiver.

Curated by Sayantan Maitra Boka

Participating Artist
Tarun Dey, TAXI, Susanta Mandal, Supriyo Sen, Sukanta Majumdar and Moushumi Bhowmik, Sujit Das, Sujay Mukherjee, Sisir Thapa, Reetu Sattar, Rathin Barman, Ranu Ghosh, Raju Sarkar, Pravat Mishra, Prasun Ghosh, Pradip Das, Piyal Adhikari, Pintu Sikdar, Performers Independent, Open to Sky Architects, Nirmal Mullick, Molla Sagar, Manju Rajak, Manas Acharya, Mallika Das Sutar, Mahbubur Rahman, Gigi Scaria, Gabriel Belanger-Oyarzun, Dhruba Dutta, Dipyaman Kar, Debasish Barui, Bhabatosh Sutar, Bani Abidi, Anuradha Pathak