Archival City- A Site of Learning
“The Archival City-A Site of Learning” is a unique pedagogy, art & design-led trans-local initiative that believes in learning from places & people through a deep immersion in the fabric of lived experiential perspectives and narrative inquiries.
The term ‘city’ is used here as a metaphor of an inter-connected web of many interacting parts, the relationships and patterns of which form a complex adaptive system.
What stories does a place reveal, when one probes without judgement, explores its nooks and crannies or simply pauses to observe? The place transforms into an archive, waiting to be unraveled as the inquiries become more layered, nuanced, genuine and complex. Through this process, one learns not just about the place, but also about the observer herself.
“The Archival City — A Site of Learning” was formally initiated in 2018 as a part of Festival of Stories 8, by the publication of a curated anthology of first-person narratives with the same name that Sudebi Thakurata, the Founder of this initiative, as a pedagogue had woven out of the reservoir of stories that the city Bengaluru had to offer to over 200 students of art and design, who explored the city as a text as a part of their learning journeys in various courses designed and facilitated by her.
The many research and practice led projects under the umbrella of “The Archival City-A Site of Learning”, are drawn from more than a decade’s work using various approaches of sense-making, critical place based pedagogy, narrative research and design using a complex systems thinking approach using ‘body as a site of learning’. In many ways, the explorations and rediscovery of old, forgotten bits of a place mirror the insights of the travelers in understanding the act of observation, perception, discovering their own biases and what it really means to see, rather than presume. In a way then the co-travelers in this process also start looking and seeking within the ‘city’, ‘shahar’ of their own ‘body’, a metaphor used by many seers, including Kabir.
The trans-disciplinary projects map and re-trace the journeys of learning and discovery of spaces and places, both external and internal. People are invited to add to the tapestry of narratives, as they contribute, listen and share these narratives and eventually co-create.