Explore The Art, Culture, And History Of Kolkata At This 10-Day Travelling Festival

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Cities are some of the most fascinating and mysterious human inventions. They are full of conformity and contradictions — as diverse and disparate as the societies that created them, always changing, and ever the same. Cities are also mobile and immobile — always moving and always rooted to the same space. Cities exist both in the real, tangible, physical world, and in the virtual realities of our contemporary, online existence. The city, both as a community and a concept, contains all of this within its physical and metaphorical self.

In 2013, at a conference held by The Museum of Vancouver, Canada, visionary urban planner Larry Beasley floated the idea of "The City as Museum". Wouldn't it be amazing if the museum of the city could tap into the archival and curatorial opportunities of a city, Beasley wondered.

"Perhaps the city museum could be equal parts physical and mobile and virtual," Beasley said in his keynote speech. "Perhaps the walls and spaces within which you now collect and curate and educate can be exploded, blown away, redefined. Perhaps the city itself — its streetscapes, its parks, its theatres, its neighborhoods, its palaces and its slums — could become the actual museum; or at least a significant part of the museum. Perhaps its airwaves and websites and every single iPhone and computer could become a significant part of the actual museum. Maybe you could take the entire museum package on the road. (...) You could program and re-set its spaces to expose the meaning of those spaces to different kinds of people in the past, in the present, in the future. You could challenge its contradictions and celebrate its harmonies. You could set up discussions by everyone everywhere about something specific somewhere through social media."

In November 2021, DAG engaged with a similar idea when the leading art company launched 'The City as a Museum' — an annual travelling festival that attempts to explore the various archives, communities, and artistic traditions that exist around the life of a city — in Kolkata. Together, these moving and unmoving parts of the city tell different stories about the city across time and space, from the point of view of neighbourhoods, collections, and institutions — but not only those — to explore the transformative potential of peripheral narratives of the city outside the confines of a traditional gallery or museum setting.

This year, DAG returns to Kolkata with the fourth edition of 'The City as a Museum' which will take place across various locations across the city from November 16. The fourth edition of 'The City as a Museum' will focus on the Tebhaga Movement — a peasant revolution against landlords as it explores narratives of women's involvement in the resistance in different agricultural districts of Bengal with Kavita Panjabi; deep dive into 18th and 19th-century maps of Calcutta at the 140-year-old publishing house of P.M. Bagchi and Company — juxtaposing colonial and indigenous mapping practices followed by a walk in the neighbourhood with Epsita Halder and Sarbajit Mitra; and trace the rehabilitation efforts of refugees from East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) to Calcutta from 1947 onwards through images, texts, and memories — focusing on creative responses to ideas of home and settlement with scholars Anwesha Sengupta, Samata Biswas, and filmmaker and photographer Debalina Majumdar, among other events and programmes.

The 10-day travelling festival of art, culture, and heritage will conclude with an evening exploring the interstitial position of thumri in Hindustani classical music and the stories of baijis and tawaifs with performances and talks by vocalist Sanjana Roy Chakraborty, Kathak performer Ashimbandhu Bhattacharya, scholar Shantanu Majee, accompanied by Parimal Chakraborty on the tabla, and Pradip Palit on the harmonium at Khelat Ghosh's residence — a historic 'Bonedi Bari', or Great House, in Kolkata.

'The City as a Museum' takes place across various state archives, historic residences and publishing houses, and third spaces across the city from November 16 until November 24. Learn more here.

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