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Proposal: Next Phase
| The Beginning Onto other neighbourhoods: A Network of Labs Consolidated list of works by CM till 2007 CM's substantial contribution in the Hindi Public Domain (2007) What CM practitioners have to say about CM Future plans – Neighbourhood Hubs – Studios – Temporary Structures – Labs Projections |
Over the last five to seven years of their practice, the senior CM practitioners have held long conversations with people with different textual, technical and artisinal practices in their neighbourhoods – poets, diarists, painters, photo studio operators, videographers, collectors, performers, storytellers, cinephiles, masons, dancers, librarians, singers, musicians, writers, readers, and more. For some among these, their practice is tied to their vocation, while others have cultivated their interests in very personal capacities, with a small fraction among them having managed to create micro-contexts of occasional meetings with a self-selected group of like-minded people. All of them seek contexts where they may gather newer publics around them and find and produce new encounters. This desire remains entirely beyond representation in the larger social and cultural fabric of the city. For Cybermohalla practitioners, their realisation of this dispersed yet intense reality, that the biographies of hundreds of people in their neighbourhoods are intertwined with a crafting of and commitment to, or a postponment or impossibility of their intellectual pursuit, has a very powerful presence. It throws up difficult questions about the knots formed by the intersections between individual biographies, possibilities inherent in urban neighbourhoods, the broader question of bringing into expression and visibility these realities, and potential interventions into knowledge and cultural infrastructure and networks of our present times.
With this as the background, in the next phase we will expand and deepen the Cybermohalla network and practices, by realising an infrastructure for cultural expression, intellectual life and creative encounters in the neighbourhoods. This will include, in the next one year, a neighbourhood hub (1), studios (2) and temporary structures (3-5) alongside locality labs (we hope to set up 5 new labs in the next 4 years). A number of long-term neighbourhood studies, including one on media environments in the neighbourhoods, will also be conducted by the practitioners to produce a critical discourse within which to nest their own practice.
This will mean that in the next three years, about 1500 young people will be directly involved in Cybermohalla, building a range of voices and articulations. We will also expand into a knowledge sharing dialogue and exchange with like-minded initiatives all over the world.
Cybermohalla is a collaborative project of Sarai-CSDS, Delhi and Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi.