Project 560 Festival kicks off in Bengaluru

Menaka Rodriguez, executive director of the India Foundation of the Arts (IFA), says that IFA’s Project 560 is an attempt to engage Bengalureans in building a deeper connection with their city. “As residents of a city, we often wonder about our relationship with the place we live and work. We need to create spaces and opportunities to stop, pause, connect and engage with each other, the people who make up our neighbourhood and the city,” she believes.

Since 2018, IFA has supported close to 50 projects, bringing together artists, scholars, and residents and engaging deeply with the neighbourhoods, cultural spaces, and natural ecosystems of Bengaluru, under Project 560 ( named after the first three digits of Bengaluru’s PIN code). These projects, which broadly fall under three categories — Neighbourhood Engagements, Arts Projects (Research/Practice) and Curated Artistic Engagements, collectively seek to create “diverse artistic and cultural interventions, enabling residents to re-imagine their city while creating lasting connections and critical conversations around its evolving identity,” as a press note issued by IFA puts it.

Chandra Keerthi B will be leading a a walk through Majestic

To celebrate seven years of Project 560 and to reflect on the road ahead, IFA will be organising the Project 560 Festival, a citywide celebration of Bengaluru through the lens of art, culture, memory, and lived experience. The festival, supported by BNP Paribas India, will be held over two weekends and feature 36 curated projects. These will unfold through walks, workshops, dramatised readings, poetry performances, talks, games, and exhibitions at various locations throughout the city. “Many of these projects have happened at different times, so when they come together, they are talking to each other and the city gets to see them collectively,” says Menaka.

Anmol Tikoo’s project explores the experiences of caregivers
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Some of the festival’s highlights include a walk through Majestic by Chandra Keerthi B, a talk about a woman’s football team by Isha Harsha Mangalmurti & PASS FC, a multi-lingual poetry workshop by Mamta Sagar, snippets from a project by Anmol Tikoo, which explores the experiences of caregivers, mental health and it’s depiction in Kannada movies, and stories about farmers’ market at Byatarayanapura from a project by Ganapathy BP, she says.

“Putting projects together in a festival is a way of celebrating the journey we have had over the last seven years,” Menaka adds. “We are thankful to be an organisation that calls Bengaluru home and excited to have supported and continue to support projects in the city that engage with it in different ways.”

The Project 560 Festival will be held today and tomorrow and on September 20 and 21, across various locations in Bengaluru. It is free and open to all. To know more, visit indiaifa.org.