Reading Trails: Food and Pandemic

Setting:

We had embarked upon a journey to engage in a process of collective sense making of the Pandemic that shook all of us a few months ago. We started in the month of May 2020, with our first episode, in that quest, immersing and engaging in a trans-local fortnightly gathering of people from many walks of life. Our quest was in search of meaning, transcending boundaries, questioning binaries.

What began as an ode to the freedom of mind, when no other freedom could be taken for granted, soon became a calling for some of us with the dream to eventually create a Musical Manifesto of our strange times sometime in 2021, in association with our design inquiry partner The Archival City, and narrative design partner D.epicentre. Music here symbolises any creative form, and not just music and manifesto is the metaphor of a declaration, a collective promise — a canvas with the potential of unimaginable possibilities when the reality does not look hopeful.

This is an inquiry-led, experimental and exploratory art and design research initiative which is designed in the spirit of collaboration and co-creation and hence truly emerging and evolving in nature. The inquiry is to learn about experiential perspectives of the Pandemic in a safe space, explore and contemplate upon further inquiries, co-sense our ways and develop insights through various forms and formats and eventually share these through multiple interpretations, imaginations and creative expressions using different modes and media.

If you want to know about/brush your memory about some of our earlier episodes you can see

Lyrical Letter Exchange
Wall of words
MaPandemic
Yes to Life.

All these sessions have emerged through an immersive process of explorations of narrative inquiries curated by our organising team. The inquiries became layered, laden with meaning, driven by purpose, by the generous, thoughtful, honest and authentic sharing and deep listening by many of our regular participants. Eventually these sessions ended up becoming healing, therapeutic and most importantly a meaning-making device for many of us. They have become an integral part of our collective well-being, something many of us look forward to.

The next episode:

The last session, Archiving Food-Trails took place on Sunday, 9th August 2020. Together, the participants followed different paths led by each other’s sharing centring around the memories, metaphors, politics and economics that underpin our relationships with food in the Pandemic.

With the unanimous agreement that the session had just scratched the surface of all the complexities and nuances that each of these trails had led us to, we wish to continue our discussions on Archiving Food-Trails, this time through a new format- LAB-RARY. It is a structure combining a Library and a Laboratory, where tinkering and reading happen together with many lenses, wearing many hats. In order to delve deeper into the many trails of food, we would like to have a Reading Circle on the 23rd of August, 6 pm (India) onwards.

We would request you to collect and share articles, papers, news pieces, poems, music and any other resources that trigger your thoughts regarding Food and its relationship with the Pandemic, and with the world at large. You could also share a line of inquiry you would like to explore together with a group of diverse people who can make it an enriching experience by adding their perspectives to it.

It would be highly appreciated it if you could send us these ideas or documents/artefacts you would wish to present or explore in the LAB-RARY by Saturday, 22nd of August 2020, as it would help us curate the session better. Please feel free to send us your sharing via

E-mail: thearchivalcity@gmail.com

WhatsApp: +91 95717 84898 (Niladri)

What’s new?

First-time attendees are more than welcome to join us! We also encourage our regular members to spread the word amongst interested people who can enrich our reservoir of perspectives. For people joining for the first time, please send us your e-mail address to thearchivalcity@gmail.com , or on the WhatsApp number listed above. A follow-up e-mail with further details will be sent out to everyone soon.

Starting Afresh

On popular demand, we also would like to open this offering for people who might want to start meeting on another day and at another time zone and we can start from our first episode onwards if we find a group (big enough to have a multitude of perspectives but small enough to retain quality in having dialogues and discourses) who can commit to meeting regularly. In keeping with the evolving nature of this initiative, if we start another group we would customise and contextualise the design of each day based on the nature of the gathering as opposed to only following the shape of the sessions as mentioned above in our medium blog articles. If you want to explore more do email us at thearchivalcity@gmail.com and we can start a conversation about how to curate this with you.

We look forward to your presence next Sunday and beyond!

Happy travelling together!

Core Design and Production Team:
Gayathri Menon
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gayathrigmenon/
Aditi Singh
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditi-singh-5809b8189/
Kunika Bajaj
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kunika-bajaj-3188051b0/
Niladri Mukherjee
https://www.linkedin.com/in/niladri-mukherjee-844134166

Design, Concept and Creative Direction:
Sudebi Thakurata
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sudebi/