maraa

Flagship Project for Community Radio in India

UNESCO in partnership with Maraa facilitated set up and capacity building for the first eight community radio stations (NGOs) to get a license in India, as per the new community radio policy released in 2006. Working across the length and breadth of the country, Maraa has worked with various NGOs, from Madurai in Tamil Nadu to Garhwa in Jharkhand and Mukteshwar in Uttarakhand. With an overall grant of 80,000 USD, Maraa in collaboration with NOMAD India network has helped to set up model community radio stations which are currently broadcasting community content in their respective regions. This project has also resulted in a bi-lingual publication, which captures key lessons and challenges from key community radio practitioners.

Community Media for learning

Commonwealth of Learning, in partnership with Maraa, has worked to create, test and publish five key capacity building modules on open source learning platform called Wikieducator. All modules have been created from scratch by Maraa, and extensively tested on the field vis-a-vis capacity building modules with existing community radio stations in India. These modules have also been made available to other communities by translating them in to Hindi and Kannada. Maraa continues its association with Commonwealth of Learning, through using community media for healthy communities and learning.

Infrastructure Research for Theatre

India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) in partnership with Maraa has undertaken an intensive quantitative and qualitative research project to investigate the status of performance spaces (or the lack thereof) for performance based artistes. The research program was conducted in Bangalore, Mysore and Dharwad, and results will feed in to the next phase of IFA’s work. Maraa continues to dialogue with IFA to see how some of the research can feed into public space and art work in the city.

Fear and Gender in Public Space

Srishti Institute of Art and Design in partnership with Maraa and various international artistes, undertook a project called Fear and Gender in Public Spaces, working with students of Srishti, implementing various methodologies in an attempt to address fear and gender in public spaces. From Cubbon Park to Russell Market in Shivajinagar, these students attempted and subsequently documented the results of interacting with the larger public. These interactions as well as methodologies have resulted in key learnings for our public space work as well as resulted in collaborations with European artistes bringing in a new dimension to art and public space practices.

Art and Culture in Public Space

Maraa and a group of individuals in Bangalore have formed a community of sorts, in October 2008, to organize a monthly event which is called Theatre Jam. On the first Sunday of every month, roughly anywhere from 10-25 artists gather at a public space in the city, usually parks, to show the wider artist community their independent performances. Each performance is followed by some discussion on both form and content. Often Theatre Jam is taken in the broadest sense to accommodate all performative arts. The event has had musicians, dancers, theatre groups performing 5 minute plays, solo performances, poetry, contemporary movement artists and so on. The Theatre Jam space, as a “conceptual commons” has resulted in performers collaborating for various projects. This project while increasingly gaining popularity amongst independent and young artists in Bangalore, remains to date, a completely non funded and community driven process and event. In October 2009, Theatre Jam completed one year of celebrating performative art and culture in the city, and had a month long event, wherein every day, various places in the city were chosen for events like film screenings, talks, theatre performances, music performances and so on. Look at our event section for details of some of our Theatre Jam events.