Jol-a-bhumir Golpo Kotha / Stories of the Wetland: A Presentation by Nobina Gupta | Project Showcase@IFA | April 30, 2024

What kind of community practices and initiatives can lead to a synergy between cities, the environment, and people?

In light of rapid and unplanned urbanisation, there is a steady depletion of water reserves in most of our cities. Over-dependence on water reserves and a general apathy has led to most of these drying up, damaging the ecosystem and the community life dependent on it, as well as causing an irreparable water supply crisis. Join us to listen to Nobina Gupta as she takes us through a project that engaged with the stories of such a place - the wetlands - located in the fringes of Kolkata, known as the East Kolkata Wetlands (EKW). 

The EKW are both natural and man-made, sustained by practices of the community who see wastewater as a nutrient. These practices highlight the valuable linkages between nature, culture and economy, and have created a symbiotic existence with the city of Kolkata. However, developmental pressure and environmental threats render this landscape susceptible and vulnerable. 

In this bi-lingual presentation, Nobina, with Nayna Naskar, a community member living in EKW, and Aahiree Banerjee, will talk about how children and youth of the wetlands became voices of awareness about their socio-spatial realities, and actively engaged with their community elders to acquire knowledge about their immediate environments. This collaborative project between IFA and PARI demonstrates the ways a community can become ‘living archives’ by internalising and retaining the acquired knowledge, alongside creating information to reach a larger audience around the world through the PARI platform.

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 | 06:30 PM IST onwards | Bangla and English

Register on Zoom or join us on Facebook Live. 

Nobina Gupta is an artist, curator and founder-director of Disappearing Dialogues Collective (dD). Since 2016, dD has been working with the peri-urban community children of EKW, on the eastern fringes of Kolkata, West Bengal.  

Nayna Naskar is a community artist and worked as the dD wetland trails eco-guide and a researcher for the project.

Aahiree Banerjee is an arts practitioner and currently associated with dD as a Project Coordinator. 

This session is organised as part of Project Showcase@IFA, a series of presentations to showcase, discuss and engage audiences with the diverse projects we support and implement across programmes.

Image courtesy: Nobina Gupta

*The title is taken from Nobina Gupta’s project with the same name.

Nobina Gupta is the Project Coordinator of the Foundation Project implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under the Archives and Museums Programme, in collaboration with People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). This has been made possible with part-support from Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi.