Shaheen Bagh Residency

This collaborative residency took place over two weeks in a cultural space in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, India, with Pooja Dhingra (Art Director; Compassion Contagion and Rafooghar), Lia Petrelli (visual artist and psychoanalyst; Plural Resistances), Tallulah Lines (ART researcher and mural artist) and Emilie Flower (ART co-investigator and filmmaker). Working alongside Rafooghar collaborators, participants, local artists and activists the developed a series of arts-based workshops, productions and research activities.

The residency was designed to explore the potential for collaborative arts-based residencies within the context of shrinking political space. Both Lia and Pooja work in fields that forefront collaborative working practices and employ forms that resist categorisation as political forms, and by doing so, circumnavigate suppression. Lia is particularly interested in non-human expression, including ‘the constant observation of the city space’, and the use of art for healing and expression within this context. This connects to Pooja’s arts-based social justice work in Rafooghar, which is guided by the principles of collaboration, compassion and love – an approach which, she explains, despite appearing innocuous, is deeply threatening to a populist government which relies on ‘disharmony’ and division. 

Of fundamental importance are the forms which both Lia’s and Pooja’s work adopt. Grounded in her practice of asemic writing but experimenting with different materials including sound and digital projection, Lia is interested in ‘new ways of marking the world, the city, and the body itself’. Indeed, this is what women have been able to do in Rafooghar through embroidery as well as other arts-based practices, which included expressive self-portraiture and dance. These forms represent pushing back through seemingly non-controversial forms and non-violence; they may involve using mediums which are ephemeral, or which seem non-confrontational given their association with femininity; and /or which appear indecipherable (and therefore harmless) without critical, slow observation. 

Structured to include a mix of activities to connect and collaborate with local artists and activists, research the local context, and time and space to develop artistic practice, the residency was an opportunity for Lia and Pooja to learn from each other’s practice, and for rich data to be gathered. The artistic and data outputs included the production of three participatory murals (at Rafooghar, at an activist action in central Delhi and on the streets of Shaheen Bagh), asemic workshops (with Rafooghar adults and children, at an open library and in an art gallery in central Delhi), and the production of a film of the residency (‘Don’t Worry We Have Nothing to Say’, produced by Emilie Flower and Lia Petrelli), alongside the interviews and participant observation. The residency also left a legacy through the knowledge exchanged, the relationships formed and the conversations that took place, including the production of an asemic training toolkit co-written by Lia and Pooja, a podcast series by Lia Petrelli, a follow-on residency for Pooja in York, a screening of the residency film screened at the York Picture House and a rich seam of data that has informed several blogs, podcasts and articles written by the project team as well as the artists involved.