HOW THESE IMAGES AND TEXTS WERE CREATED

Open Space ran a three day storytelling and art workshop with the girls at the Anjuman-i-Islam Orphanage in Pune. The purpose of the sessions was to let young girls have the opportunity to construct the world around them through words and images.

The workshop moderators were Hansa Thapliyal (from Majlis, Bombay), Renu Iyer (from Open Space, Pune) and Madhu Anantarajan.

Story Telling Exercises:

Day One began with Hansa telling stories ranging from folklore to fiction and using comic books like the Amar Chitra Katha. This was an exercise to get the participants to identify characters and stereotypes in these narratives, then to see what they read into them and finally, to record their observations. The session continued with observations on fiction, making up stories and fabricating tales, about the concept of fiction, lies and myth and how these are imperative in the whole process of constructing other truths. The girls were given a short exercise to get them thinking about how to make fiction from almost nothing. However since the exercise was to also stimulate their imaginations and to make them think of ideas, they were given a cluster of elements, both inanimate and animate, that they could build on, for example, apple, knife, Renu, dormitory, girls.

Pictorial Exercises:

Can we tell stories through images?
Each image, in a sense, is a story in itself. This was conceived as a playful exercise of connecting visuals and creating a story out of them. Each group was given 5 random images (from a selection of comic book pictures and magazines, i.e., using images that impact upon us in the most unsuspecting ways) and a sheet of plain paper. The groups had to compose stories by juxtaposing the ready-made images and make drawings wherever necessary to connect the story. Each group wrote a short story based on this collage on the back of the pictorial composition. They had to manipulate images and connect them with drawings and compose fiction, almost like a game. This was an exercise in which we associate images with metaphors, drawing on familiar and unfamiliar registers.

How do you tell a tale without words?
In this exercise the girls worked on small pictorial booklets without text to enhace their visualisation + illustration skills. The image-stories they had worked on in the earlier session were reshuffled and randomly handed out to new groups. Each member of this group had to illustrate one scene from the story, serially. They were given postcard size cards but no readymade images. This was a complete reversal of the previous exercise which was constructing stories out of random, ready made images in which the visualisation was not linear. Contrasting approaches to expression which is not limited to or by words (ideas, thoughts etc).