QUEER BROWN STORIES
collaborative mural, community engagement.
Queer Brown Stories’, as heard on BBC Radio 6 is an initiative led by and for the Queer & Trans South Asian community in Camden. It is part of the Connecting Camley Street Artwork Programme. Curated by Dhaga, this project expresses the Queer & Trans South Asian Community’s experience and aspirations for the future of cities through creative community engagement.
Central to this initiative were two creative workshops, designed to hold space for the community to come together and share their experiences through exploratory creative outputs. These sessions were instrumental in shaping the narrative and visual identity of the mural.
Each participant's contribution, whether through poetry or collage, are boldly woven into the mural by myself and artist Sarith Ratnayake.
These include celebrating Queer joy and the connected intersectionality within the community, the often layered and complex identities of Queer and Trans South Asian people which are shaped by many facets; such as, personal and collective histories, ancestral connections, navigating a Queer diasporic identity within the city and the community’s visions for a more inclusive future.
Working with the community
The project commenced with a free-writing poetry workshop called 'Space, Place & Belonging', facilitated by artist, writer and poet, Nikita Aashi Chadha (they/them). This was a closed, safe online space for folks to engage with complex themes within diasporic experience in a lighter touch way through the mediums of poetry and freewriting and the lenses of postcolonial and Queer theory.
Participants explored the localised Queer & Trans South Asian history of Camden, and their feelings towards space, place & belonging. The collective poem created during the workshop flows through the mural and mingles with the conversations and visuals that arose from the second workshop.
I faciliated the second workshop ‘Taking Up Space in the City’. This workshop centred collective collaging, carving out space for participants to explore their experiences, and envisage the future of Queer South Asian presence in Camden.
To celebrate the mural, an event was held at the underpass to unravel the artwork and celebrate the community’s input.
As the mural explored various themes of Queer and Trans South Asian existence in the city, and was designed to pose many questions and prompts to gauge further dreaming and exploring by the community - I faciliated another workshop where the community were encouraged to draw a response over printed versions of the mural design, gently prompted by questions.
