The Govandi Arts Festival, a five-day cultural movement will begin on Wednesday, February 15. It is being conducted with a vision to showcase and promote the artistic abilities of Govandi and reclaim the narrative of the neighbourhood. The Govandi Arts Festival, through varied performative and visual arts, and also a part of the ‘India/UK Together, a Season of Culture’, taking place in India and the UK from June 2022 to March 2023, aims to highlight that Govandi is more than just a ‘ghetto’.
It is one of the biggest projects of the ‘Season of Culture’ in west India. The arts festival also marks an end to six months of mentorships in Govandi, where 45 youth were mentored by acclaimed Mumbai-based artists. Additionally, to give creative expression to the “stories, aspirations, and lives” of communities living in marginalised neighbourhoods, the Govandi Arts Festival’s Artist Residency Programme has brought together three Mumbai-based artists to create contextual, site-specific art.
These artists — Jerry Antony, Nisha Nair Gupta, and Meera Goradia — have been working in Govandi for over three months to create art in the form of animation, crafts, ethnographic mapping, and storytelling with the local residents.
Sandhya Naidu Janardhan, founder and managing director of Community Design Agencies, an architecture and design agency, which is leading the festival along with Lamplighter Arts CIC (UK), and Streets Reimagined (UK), said that Govandi Arts Festival is a celebration of the joy and skills that reside in marginalised urban neighbourhoods.
The festival held mentorship programs across five themes for six months for over 45 youth from around Govandi, organised an artist residency programme with three artists to use their skills to engage and create on-site installations with the residents, and a lantern parade led by the community, she said.
Artist Meera Goradia has been working with rural artisans for the last three decades and finds it “a world of cultural and social richness as well as economic potential”. While working on the workshops, Goradia found that Govandi is thriving with enterprises of every kind.
There’s also artist Nisha Nair Gupta, who is an urban researcher and founder of ‘The People Place Project’. In this residency, she is mapping the Natwar Parekh Colony (NPC) through the stories of its residents. To curate these stories, Gupta shared that she often conducted focus group meetings, dubbed ‘circle time’. This, according to the artist, allowed her to witness the casualties of our city’s development politics at a very close scale.
According to the artists, Govandi Arts Festival is a good reminder to celebrate humanity in action.
The festival will be open to the public from February 15 to 19, at Natwar Parekh Colony, Govandi, featuring an array of events, including the work of the resident artists.
