Spending time in an artsy environment can often inspire some amazing creations. Interacting with other artists in your field at the same time can also have a huge positive impact on your work and spur new ideas. But interacting and collaborating with artists from other genres of art can also add an extra burst of awesome. And that’s exactly what Platform for Artists aims to do.
Platform for Artists is a community organisation which does collaborative art projects with all kinds of artists across the country. It was founded in April 2017 by four friends who were into different forms of art“ theatre, photography,dance and writing. “We often used to collaborate with each other and realised that this inter disciplinary collaboration helped us a lot,” says Pawan Rochwani, one of the co-founders. The group then decided to try and get other artists involved in this. They began first with a three hours session in Pune where they are based, and slowly these sessions began to grow. “We did an Art Overnight project, a first of its kind, where we got artists to come to a location at 10 pm at night, collaborate spontaneously and then exhibit their works the next day,” recalls Rochwani. Collaborative workshops and exhibitions of this sort have since been held by them in cities like Ahmedabad, Chennai and Bangalore apart from Pune.
Apart from this, they also love doing art residencies and have so far conducted eight of this sort in different locations across the country like Pondicherry, Manali, Jaipur and Agra. Their upcoming art residency in Goa titled Goa Art Affair which begins on June 15 will be the second one in the state.
“At such residencies we get artists from different parts of India be it designers, writers, photographers, writers etc to come and work together for three days. There is no fixed agenda or output,” explains Rochwani. The focus, he states, is always on the creation process. “No matter how much he enjoys exhibiting or selling his work, any artist will tell you that the best part is always the process of creation,” he says.
Having previously come down to Goa in November 2017, the group of 20 artists assembled at Folklore hostel in Vagator last time around. “It was a completely new property and we were the first people to stay there. We spent the time painting the walls of the property with grafitti, warli art etc,” says Rochwani. Apart from this, they also got in touch with Goan people associated with art. “We had a three hour interactive session with Victor Hugo Gomes of Goa Chitra Museum and also one with dancer Cecille Rodrigues. We are hoping to have such sessions this time too,” says Rochwani.
This time around, the three day residency will be held at Jungle by The Hostel Crowd and will feature 20 artists from different cities like Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Chennai. There will also be three Goan artists- 2 dancers and 1 musician.There will also be a cleanliness drive on the last day.
The group is also looking at publishing a book of short stories in November this year and will be making efforts to help musicians get gigs in restaurants.
