on stage: sathenagar here

Narratives and Performance:
The video narrative scripted by Santosh Thorat drew visual chronicles of significant events reflecting a series of short films on Sathenagar’s diversity, its struggling resource and its collective biography. These shorts represent dispatches and letters from a wry sense of humor, weaving observations into parables reflecting on the contradictions and paradoxes that separate everyday life and reality from the standards, ideas and imaginaries that animate modern civic life such as cleanliness, secularism and self government

Various genres of performances were observed while mapping Sathenagar intensively.
These performances choreograph space, extracting and reshaping the settlement around artistic performance. On these stages, young men and women have been experimenting with traditional forms of poetry, dance and theatre.
The performances negotiated the ideas of stage, scripts, improvizaton and self expressions that breaks from the didactic approach of street theatre .

Architecture and Installation:
Mirroring the growth of Sathenagar, ‘Samooha’ began with shelter and settlement, setting up a dialogue between the aesthetic principles of formal architectural practices and informal cultures of building, crafting and making. We modelled the physical and emotional terrains of Sathenagar – its landscapes – as representations of what exists and as projections of hoped for transformations.

From this collaborative process of modelling, Samooha created an interactive installation, reflecting Sathenagar’s spatial conditions and experiences in a by-lane that leads from one of Fort Kochi’s main thoroughfares to the seafront promenade. This installation is animated with audio, video and photographic materials created by residents of Sathenagar to address the world.

It explored how one might relocate flows of language, heritage, tradition and practice embedded tacitly in every life into this self conscious space for exploring creativity.