Workshop on Creative Endeavour in the CRG Youth Meet, 28-30 March 2024, Bolpur – A note

The Youth Meet on “Urban Caregiving and Protection: Histories and Contemporary Practices,” was organised by the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) in collaboration with the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, from 28 to 30 March 2024, in Bolpur. The speakers in the session titled “Ethics and Aesthetics of Life: A Workshop”, on 29 March 2024, two Youth Meet participants, namely, Agni (Visual Artist) and Shruti Roy (Postgraduate Student, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad), conducted a workshop, encouraging fellow programme participants to create magazines and share thoughts and give suggestions for ways to work on protection of children from child labour, among other themes, representation of stories, poems, drawings, collection of memorabilia and objects, staged as pieces of art, readings or visual pieces, as well as other depictions. The facilitator for the session was Sucharita Sengupta (Researcher, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata). This session brought together expressions and experiences of the participants of the Youth Meet through the ‘zines’ they created and shared.

The creative endeavours culminated into a collection of art work through the deliberations, and conversations in the Youth Meet. Several of the zines with the creative expressions were reflections and thoughts put together on the elaborate discussion in the sessions and the themes and sub-themes of the Youth Meet, embedded in the narratives of the participants. The zines are in a way, a new series in the collective of CRG documentation that brings together free thinking, expression through art and the learnings and opinions of the youth activists, researchers, journalists, and artists who participated in the programme.

On the last day of the meet, 30 March 2024, the session “Dunes and Depths of Urbanity: Creative Endeavours” was designed for open discussion. The facilitator for the session was Rajat Kanti Sur (Researcher, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata). In this session, the zines created by the Youth Meet participants were put on display, and the participants of the programme not only talked about their inspirations and representations in the work of art, but also shared their opinion and thoughts on the zines that fellow participants had made and conversations followed.

The Calcutta Research Group is thankful to the participants of the Youth Meet for sharing their thoughts and art work that adds to the visual repository of the institute.

[Cover Image: poster of the workshop]

This note was prepared by Shatabdi Das, Research Associate at Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. Shatabdi maybe reached at shatabdi@mcrg.ac.in .