LAB results

The PAL HAT:LAB offered space, time and a mix of informal and rigorous exploration, interrogation and collaborative practice between talented individuals who had not worked together before in India.

Participants took daily walks to meet local crafts people, to explore the sensory landscape of the old city, to identify models of sustainable living and to devise ideas for exchanges and cultural events based at Arts Reverie and across the city. Plans include an Arts Festival on The Making of Beauty in November 2010. A major International Conference on The Earth Charter in October will host a PAL Lab for leading environmental artists and scientists to share and challenge their practice in the forest of the Centre for Environment Education.

PAL HAT:LAB partners, and the artists and crafts people working with them, will realize their shared vision of heritage and cultural research and creative development within the regeneration of Ahmedabad and in wider regions of Gujarat. UK partnerships are offering further opportunities to be able to extend these activities and models first tested in India in similar sites of regeneration in the UK. Lab participants are brokering partnerships to secure sufficient in kind and financial resources to advocate for, oversee and participate in the delivery of modest projects that focus on celebrating and sustaining skills and talents of local people living and working in small communities where there is a strong ‘sense of place‘ in the UK and in India. LAB outcomes include the resolve to establish Arts Reverie as an international centre for the research and development of contemporary crafts practice.
The first “Dhal ni Pol Creative Space Project” in Ahmedabad led by LAB partners and local people will launch the 3 year programme to include:

The four nations (England, Scotland, N.Ireland, Wales) annual crafts residencies at Arts Reverie 2011-12-13 – in partnership with craft development agencies UK, British Council and Arts Council England, Arts Council Northern Ireland, Scottish Arts Council, Welsh Assembly

Manchester Metropolitan Uuniversity Crafts Research Group, in partnership with Ahmedabad International Arts Festival and MIRIAD, National Institute of Design
HAT international exchange fellowships- partnerships with Museums and Galleries in UK and Ahmedabad

Annual Design Camps – through partnerships with various academic institutions/research centres in UK and crafts people in India
In addition to the above PAL and the University for the Creative Arts in the UK will design specific sensory research projects within the framework of their Pedagogy of Curiosity sensory research programme in collaboration with Ahmedabad’s Centre for Environment Education, the Riverside School and local artists and craftspeople living and working across the city.

Statements / questions for the discussion:

What role can the arts and crafts play in shaping environmental awareness in a sustained way?

How can creativity and imagination in their own terms be implemented in life-long learning and everyday life practices?

What are effective strategies to fully immerse ourselves in the environment and sense an alternative future? Are there ‘universal’ approaches and methods that work across differences in culture, generation, gender, belief systems etc.?