Call for Proposals: The CITY as STUDIO Sarai-CSDS Fellowship
The Sarai Programme at the Center for Study of Developing Societies, Delhi is an interdisciplinary platform for the investigation and interpretation of contemporary urban experience. Sarai produces events and processes, publishes offline and online content and generates contexts for research and creative practice concerning contemporary urban conditions.
The Sarai Media Lab invites expressions of interest and intent from artists and practitioners in diverse media – textual, visual, aural, spatial and temporal – who could be – visual artists (photographers, sculptors, installation artists, graphic artists), writers and independent scholars, filmmakers, architects, experimental musicians and composers, sound recordists, performers and people whose practices straddle or transcend different areas of practice - for participation in the ‘City as Studio’ Project.
The City as Studio initiative will create contexts for high intensity inter-disciplinary processes at different locations in Delhi and at the Sarai space at CSDS. Sometimes these process(es) may be rendered as an exhibition, at other times as a gathering, as a library, as a temporary archive or as an occasion for performances, conversations and debates. At still other times it may take the form of a workshop, a temporary atelier, a media studio, a publication or an online
platform.
The City as Studio is neither a one off event, nor a workshop or a residency, nor a festival or a simple cluster of public programmes – though it has elements of all of the above. It is primarily a method of generating a new public profile for creative work in the city, a scanning of the horizon of possibilities that can be opened up in urban spaces through the presence of art, experimental cultural activity and public exchanges.
The studio process plans to bring together artists, filmmakers, photographers, discursive interlocutors, architects, writers, urbanists, scientists, architects, social actors and cultural workers, neighbourhood initiatives and diverse audiences to create art works, participatory performances, media works, and transmissions of
different kinds of signals.
Possible areas of that will be reflected upon could include but need not be limited to:
- the city as spectacle, as a site of consumption, as an arena of power
- the growing intensity of surveillance,
- the question of distance and anchorage: housing and transportation
- access to resources, location and privilege
- the local pursuits of pleasure
- life, death, and rites of passage in the city
- the everydayness and banality of terror
- imagined histories and urban legends, the fantastical and uncanny city
- the archived and remembered city
- urban ecologies, the city as a zone of bio-diversity, urban forests, rivers
- ways of life, sub-cultures, bodies of informal knowledge, local practices
- migrants, margins and minorities
Sarai invites applicants to imagine that the city itself is their studio, and that urban realities are their materials in order to create artistic work that acts as a body of public knowledge in and about the city.


Context is decisive. It all depends on how you look at an issue, that provides the solutions that it throws up. Sharing with you one anecdotal example in the context of malnutrition among children below five years of age in a South East Asian country.
Following is an excerpt from City Improbable writing on Delhi, a Delhi anthology edited by Khushwant Singh. The book is a complete rendezvous with Delhi, its historical as well as recent past and its present and is aptly reviewed by the Telegraph as, “Anyone who has ever had anything to do with Delhi, or is interested in the history of cities, should take a look at this collection”.


