Govandi Arts Festival 2023: How three artists have given a creative expression to stories of this neighbourhood in Mumbai

These artists — Jerry Antony, Nisha Nair Gupta, and Meera Goradia — have been working in Govandi for over three months to create art in the form of animation, crafts, ethnographic mapping, and storytelling with the local residents.

The Govandi Arts Festival is part of the ‘India/UK Together, a Season of Culture’ (Source: Community Design Agency)

Sandhya Naidu Janardhan, founder and managing director of Community Design Agencies, an architecture and design agency, which is spearheading the festival along with Lamplighter Arts CIC (UK), and Streets Reimagined (UK), said that Govandi Arts Festival is a celebration of the joy and skills that reside in marginalised urban neighbourhoods. “It has a robust arts-based framework focussed on building and showcasing the talents of spatially and culturally marginalised communities through inclusive processes,” she told indianexpress.com.

Janardhan shared that the festival has two overarching goals. “First, to provide residents—especially youth, with access to high-quality artistic mentorship and a public platform to express themselves joyfully; without minimising their lived experiences. The second is to use art as a gateway for those outside the neighbourhood to understand its human joys and complexities, washing away entrenched stigma and judgment.”

For the same, the festival held mentorship programs across five themes for six months for over 45 youth from around Govandi, organised an artist residency programme with three artists to use their skills to engage and create on-site installations with the residents, and a lantern parade led by the community, she said.

For Janardhan, who has been engaging with Govandi residents since 2016, “launching an arts festival feels like a natural, exciting evolution that will have a long-term, positive impact” as art and creativity are central to her agency’s work in the neighbourhood.

The festival held mentorship programs across five themes for six months for over 45 youth from around Govandi (Source: Community Design Agency)

Artist Meera Goradia has been working with rural artisans for the last three decades and finds it “a world of cultural and social richness as well as economic potential”. “The aim of the residency has been to highlight how people who migrate from rural regions to cities carry the memories and skills from where they come,” Goradia told indianexpress.com.

She added, “The residency aimed to showcase some of the work through designing products that would be used during the Govandi Arts Festival itself. There will also be workshops for the community along with other visitors. We plan to call Anuj Sharma, of Button Masala fame, to conduct training with his method of constructing garments with simple fastening through buttons. We decided to call him as many of the women are already engaged in post-tailoring and embroidery job work. We felt this would add a new dimension to their work as they would be able to construct garments without a sewing machine. The other workshops are more fun like mehendi and jewellery making.”

While working on these workshops, Goradia found that Govandi is thriving with enterprises of every kind. “While some were engaged in skills like crochet and embroidery, others made jewellery and zardozi work which are being commissioned by high-end boutiques.”

There’s also artist Nisha Nair Gupta, who is an urban researcher and founder of ‘The People Place Project’. In this residency, she is mapping the Natwar Parekh Colony (NPC) through the stories of its residents. “Along with interviews and focus group meetings, stories are being documented by few women in the community. These stories will be accessible through the community podcast and take the form of an exhibition at the Arts festival. The project is called Awaaz (Voices),” she told indianexpress.com.

To curate these stories, Gupta shared that she often conducted focus group meetings, dubbed ‘circle time’. “Mostly attended by women, these sessions became very cathartic forums for all of us to open up about our personal challenges. Their act of sharing their lives with us was also an act of wanting to be heard,” she said. This, according to the artist, allowed her to witness the casualties of our city’s development politics at a very close scale.

According to the artists, Govandi Arts Festival is a good reminder to celebrate humanity in action (Source: Community Design Agency)

For the third artist, Jerry Antony, a storyteller and visual communicator, this residency has been an attempt to highlight the spirit of the community through their everyday stories. “The aim is also to involve the community in the process and have them as co-creators of the final installation,” he said.

He called this experience of working in Govandi for the past three months as “educational” and “nostalgic”. “It was a tough job initially to engage the kids and introduce concepts of animation for whom the workshops were voluntary, but after a couple of sessions, and a lot of games, we had a great time narrating stories and gossiping. With the elders, it was much easier than expected and I was surprised at their unapologetic expression right from the first session,” Antony said.

The artist, who has always been drawn to narratives that celebrate the subtle nuances of human interaction, shared that the time spent at Govandi has been insightful in developing sensitivity and responsibility toward exploring these interactions. “I think my understanding of people was proved wrong on many occasions and the whole journey has reinforced the childlike curiosity that makes a good filmmaker,” he shared.

A 20-year-old local resident Tayyaba Darvesh, who was asked to share her story by Nisha and her team, said while it was nerve-wracking to narrate her entire life to them, she felt nice after talking to them. “I wasn’t scared of the recording process after the initial nervousness and I enjoyed sharing my story with them face to face,” he told indianexpress.com.

Darvesh added that she initially assumed the Govandi Arts Festival to be just about painting murals and never expected that the youth from the neighbourhood would get a chance their talent. “I hope people coming from outside will change their thought about us and our parents too will realize that their kids are talented and encourage them to pursue it. I feel liberated because of the Festival, because of how I got to meet and talk to new people, learnt how to interact with them, and tried new things.”

According to the artists, Govandi Arts Festival is a good reminder to celebrate humanity in action. “I don’t think people at Govandi are any different from people anywhere else, but they have been labelled with a context that they seldom get a chance to shed,” Antony said.

Urging people to let go of these preconceived notions, Darvesh asked everyone to give the people of Govandi a chance to show their talent. “What the children of Govandi can do, maybe no one else can,” she mentioned.

Concluding, Janardhan said, “Jerry, Nisha and Meera are extremely talented and intuitive artists and they’ve laboured for many months, drawing inspiration from their surroundings to shine a light on the neighbourhood through their creations.”

The festival will be open to the public from February 15 to 19, at Natwar Parekh Colony, Govandi, featuring an array of events, including the work of the resident artists.

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