Stories. Why do we tell them? Why do they exist? Those questions can be answered by using terms like ‘oral histories’, ‘traditions’, ‘listening skills’ and ‘pedagogy’. All very valid. At Golpo Mela, the PeaceWorks Storytelling Festival, it is however, much more. Before the day of the festival, I had visited a centre to help with…
The last phase of the Exchange for Change project dealt extensively with oral history narratives. School children on either side of the border collected oral histories from people who had either witnessed the partition themselves, or had heard about partition from those who had experienced it. Rudrani Gangopadhyay, a volunteer with the 1947 Partition Archives,…
What does the word border mean? When do we think about it? When politicians talk about them? When wars are fought? Does it require an event to initiate a discussion about borders? Exchange for Change, a yearlong program conducted in collaboration with the Citizens Archive of Pakistan addressed, through intensive workshops, the idea of borders.…
Art and peace are both located in the tension between emotions and intellect. Life unites what concepts and dualisms keep apart. And art, like peace, has to overcome such false dichotomies by speaking both to the heart and to the brain, to the compassion of the heart and the constructions of the brain. ~ Johan…
‘We share the same air and the same soil’, writes one of the students participating in the Exchange for Change program, words that resonate powerfully.In the wake of one of the most heinous crimes in recent history, an exchange program between the youth, and the future of two countries currently caught in a spiral of…
