Shaona Sen

Shaona Sen is a Bangalore based cultural practitioner and a football coach, and the co-founder of Shining Stars Football Club (SSFC). She has twelve years of cross-cultural experience in design, sport and development sectors between India and USA. She is an active voice of equal opportunity in creating formative learning experiences. She did her BFA in Communication Design from Pratt Institute, New York and she has also completed a graduate summer course in Cross Border Innovation from Harvard University. As a brand design researcher and consultant, Shaona has served in Reebok International (Boston), Ashoka (Boston), and Quicksand (India+China), among others. As a football coach, she is highly qualified with various certifications including FIFA for Good Coerver - APAC Coaching Certification (2014, Vietnam) and All India Football Federation - D License Certification (2018, Bangalore). As a football coach, she has served in Magic Bus Foundation’s MBFT football specialised program.

With this grant, Shaona as the co-founder of Shining Stars Football Club (SSFC) will lead a series of participatory art events based on skills and tactics of football as a form of art and creative expression, with the children of two marginalised communities in Bangalore. Shaona believes that football is a tool of dignity, choice, network and freedom for children who are navigating through the concept of identity in a fast-moving world in which poverty becomes an obstacle to growth. Shaona has been building rapport and direct community work through football coaching and mentoring for more than seven years, with 115 children and youth from more than 90 families in the two marginalised communities of Doddana Nagar and Bandepalya. As an artist who has been trained as a communication designer, Shaona wants to design meaningful social goals through football play, focused on teamwork and self-expression.

The children will come up with a name for this project. As a community-based art practitioner, Shaona believes in developing child-led processes. It is driven by participatory design, dialogues and collaborative ideations to reach goals identified as a team. Ideas and opinions are expressed through the form of surveys, worksheets, child-led synthesis and team workshopping. She will draw inspiration from football itself, as a form of art as well as a playful game with various methodologies and processes to practice, perform and compete. Shaona says, “Football, as a team sport, encourages discipline, creativity, fair play and various lessons on the pitch that can translate off the pitch. We would like to explore how the Covid pandemic Lockdown can be a source of inspiration through everyday visuals and objects through a child’s perspective.”

As an artist, Shaona can be seen as a creative midfielder, supplying accurate timely passes to the children who play as artistically agile strikers. The eighteen month work plan of Shaona is based on the football pitch as an artistic framework. There are three phases to the project such as the defensive third (ideation), middle third (transition) and final third (attacking). The processes for these three phases are outlined as ‘protect and discover’ in the defensive third which includes diaries by children, surveys and making of zines, to document the experiences of the communities through the Covid-19 pandemic; ‘create and exchange’ in the middle third will have a mural in Bandepalya and roadside games at Doddana Nagar; and the ‘final show and goal conversion’ in the final third will have a public exhibition and a play festival as the goals. Shaona imagines the timeline of the project as a relationship of the thirds, each of them for six months each.  

In the defensive phase, there is emphasis on documenting the experiences of Covid pandemic lockdown from a child’s perspective. In the SSFC communities of Doddana Nagar and Bandepalya, the pandemic and lockdown have revealed truths around socioeconomic divide, religious strife, police brutality and community health challenges given lack of distancing, amongst other challenges. On surveying of SSFC families shortly after the first phase of the national lockdown was announced, Shaona and team have learnt that an average family has 5 members that spends an estimated Rs 1043 on food every week, with 58% of earning less than Rs.5000 per month. The daily challenges they have always faced have now been exacerbated by the pandemic. Moreover, Shaona also wants to focus on gender based discriminations, by bringing out stories from the perspective of the girl child. In her football coaching, Shaona encourages girls and boys to play together, to inculcate mutual respect, gender equality and professionalism. Another social problem that the children pointed out during the survey is religious hatred and the apathy of the police towards religious minorities. Shaona’s impact vision is a heightened child-centered understanding within our communities of diversity. This project will enable further skills development of 115 children and youth through critical thinking, documentation, visualisation and community engagement; a stronger sense of community, team and self through creative expression; and community-led reshaping of mindsets and spaces during the pandemic. Shaona will be joined by her teammates Prabhakar Manivel, Kedar Sastry and Anjaly Ariyananagam. 

IFA finds it important to support this project as a meaningful intervention in Bangalore that explores artistic elements of a synergetic sport like football to energise adolescent lives in two marginalised communities in the city, at a time of unprecedented crisis in the lives of lower-income groups that is posed by Covid pandemic. Shaona’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a detailed textual and illustrated document of the curatorial process and outcomes, photo and video documentation of the events, publicity materials, the community playbook kit, and copies of the zines and magazine.