I feel as though September 2019 was spent on an entirely different planet in a parallel universe. It seems like eons ago that Yasho, Sunayana, Thej and I received the Gender Bender grant and pulled off a multimedia installation project at Gender Bender 2019 while holding down our full time jobs. As I write this, that thrill of building on an idea from scratch is almost palpable.
For the uninitiated, Project On Her Own is a call-in service where you (can still) call +91 80660 84304 and listen to everyday stories of women and share your own. We had little over a month to put this together. We organised phone booths in Cubbon Park, ran workshops with women and had over 1000 calls to show for it. You can read more about it here, here and here.
Earth has gone around the sun once and life has changed in many ways. But when the anniversary of our epic feat came around we couldn’t but revisit the ‘what next’. We’ve always talked about building out an archive for the everyday stories of women that are still getting collected behind the scenes. What if we could harness the asynchronicity of WhatsApp as an upload mechanism for stories? What if we collected stories in workshop mode from communities and groups that we are keen to engage with? Questions like these and more finally got us thinking about Project On Her Own_Version 2.0
I am delighted to report that we have begun reconvening on this idea. On Sunday afternoons, I drag myself from sleep at 3 pm to groggily join the discussion on how to move forward with Project On Her Own. I give up my nap only because I tremendously appreciate the opportunity to work with this team that works like clockwork.
More on our progress soon!
Sign up to receive these posts in your email: