News from the liaison office of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in South Asia
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2.6.2023
Greeting the Monsoon
May ended with some unexpected showers in Delhi; perhaps we shall herald in an early monsoon.
This weather report also comes with a shower also of other announcements - including two different support measures: the Synergies Open Call and the Co-creation Support. She Got Game participants on mentorship programmes are featured. Indian cultural practitioner Pooja Sood goes to Switzerland on a research trip. Meanwhile, Rohini Devasher and Elisa Storelli continue on to CERN to complete the next leg of their Connect India residency.
We end with glimpses of Ranjana Dave's Art Writers' Award residency at Villa Sträuli. And no better way to greet the monsoon than with some good old-fashioned song-and-dance.
Pro Helvetia New Delhi
Image from Ranjana Dave's lecture performance at Villa Sträuli
OPEN CALLS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
Synergies: Support for research-based programmes in art, science and technology
Synergies. Image © Jean Vicent Simonet
The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia is looking to support research-based and process-oriented programmes that foster exchange between art, science and technology involving organisations in Switzerland and across the world.
From hackathons to fellowships, from residencies to think tanks – the Synergies open call offers support for international collaborations and encourages programmes which spark new approaches, methodologies and connect knowledge from different contexts.
Application deadline: 2 October 2023. Read more here.
Co-creation Support
Illustration © Yawen Li
To further strengthen its mandate of intercultural exchange and to offer support to artistic practices that result from previous exchanges, Pro Helvetia is launching a two-year pilot measure to support co-creation.
The co-creation grant provides support to tandems made up of individual artists or collectives (i.e. companies, groups, etc.) from the liaison offices regions and Switzerland who wish to embark on a peer-to-peer creation process. It is seen as a next step after a completed research trip or residency. Additionally, it is a way to support artists in deepening mutual artistic practice. Read more here.
She Got Game
She Got Game is our first-ever mentoring and networking programme for women in the interactive media sector! Meet two game industry professionals from India and Switzerland taking part in this initiative.
👏Monica Selvandurai (India) @_crayoncat with her project “Untitled Bakery Game”, a semi-casual management simulation where the player grows and expands their bakery business while keeping up with current trends and customer expectations.
👏Luciana Vigano (Switzerland) @knitnpurlgamestudio with her project “Pocket Oasis”, a hand painted game where the player can create their own virtual balcony in a random city around the world.
Read more on this instagram post.
RESIDENCY & RESEARCH TRIP
Pooja Sood on research trip to Switzerland
Pooja Sood. Photo courtesy Khoj Studios
Pooja Sood is a founding member and Director of Khoj International Artists’ Association, India. She is active in the field of curating alternative contemporary art practices in India as well as exploring different models of collaboration and institution building in India and South Asia. Pooja will be on a research trip to Switzerland.
Rohini Devasher and Elisa Storelli at CERN on Connect India Residency
Rohini Devasher and Elisa Storelli. Photo courtesy Harsh Khatwani / ICTS
Having completed a four-week residency at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bengaluru, Rohini Devasher and Elisa Storelli will be at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, for the second leg of their Connect India residency. The goal of the Connect residency is to develop research towards an artistic project in dialogue with the scientists, engineers and staff of the laboratories. Read more about the artists and their projects here.
GALLERY
RANJANA DAVE IN SPOTLIGHT
Ranjana Dave. Photo credits: Raj Das
In this month's gallery, we showcase Art Writers' Award 2022 recipient Ranjana Dave and her dispatches from Villa Sträuli and Switzerland. Ranjana is an artist and writer. Her practice, emerging from her movement training in Odissi and her writing and research, unfolds at the intersection of text and movement.
Below are the first three installments of her blog series published online at TAKEonArt Magazine.
How do you constitute the body through language? Over this first week in Winterthur, I’ve tried to sort through the questions informing my project, in order to arrive at what, how and why. And to acclimatize. Right now, I have more questions than answers. Read more.
Stickers along a May Day parade route
A residency can get incredibly lonely. You spend a couple of months in a new environment, too short to call it home, but also too long to take comfort in the novelty of fleeting encounters. It’s a strange collision of being here and not really being here. Read more.
Interacting with my ‘avatar’ at the ZHdK Immersive Arts Space
When I fold over during a spinal roll-down sequence, I anticipate with great pleasure the rhythm of stacking my vertebrae back up, each vertebra arriving in place over the previous one with faith and certainty. If the body were a sentence, then this anticipation of what is about to happen is an ellipsis… Read more.
Ranjana Dave at Villa Sträuli
How does language shape the body in performance? This lecture performance locates its imagination of language in what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus, which he describes as the learned set of preferences or dispositions by which a person orients to the social world - what they like, how they present themselves, and also how they make meaning of things. To speak of language, then, is to speak of identity: of how we belong to specific times, places, communities, or ideas. Click here for the YouTube video.
