krvia workshop

..."hey ajay, we want you to conduct a 4day workshop for our students...do anything you feel like or wish to explore with them". ya sure, i said without thinking too much. and then the panic!...i hadn't done anything like this before, for architecture students at that! thinkin'thinkin'thinkin'...couldn't go beyond stuff i was obsessing about while working on the edit of my dad film ...memories...photographs...spaces... the opening of wim wender's film "notebook on cities and clothes" provided a perfect start:
we live in the cities
the cities live in us
time passes
we move from one city at another
from one country to another
we change languages
we change habits
we change opinions
we change clothes
we change everything
everything changes. and fast
images above all...

i wasn't working with a hypothesis...just kept it open end-ed and exploratory. hadn't a clue what to expect but very excited n nervous. talked to them about my film about my dad n took it further from there. introductions, perceptions, self-image n fav spaces... the first day was the hardest...had to talk a lot more than i had wanted to. wasn't able to get on top of things. the room was stuffy, the students reticent, the av equipment ng. i was exhausted by the evening...but from the second morning on they were flying n by the third morning they didn't even need me!

each evening on my long rick ride back home, would think how lovely n lucky these students were to have a faculty who valued these inter-disciplinary exchanges. there was ashok sukumaran and rahul srivastav who tripped along with another bunch of students taking them to other heights of experience n experimentation...

enjoyed every bit of it n learnt so much...esp how lame i am in my idea of the sacredness of an image...learnt how much more my laptop can do! o it was such fun! showed them hiroshima, mon amour and metropolis and blue...we struggled with how this would all come together on the last day as a presentation to the rest of the college. but they did fine...as you will see in the next post!