Supporting Indigenous Creative Economies in a Digital Age

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The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the marginality and precariouness of indigeneous and nomadic communities in India, erasing traditional artistic and performance based livelihoods and pushing these communities into extreme poverty. The project will create the possibilities for the translation of these creative practices to forms that can circulate in the digital creative economy, through the consolidation of the learnings and skills developed in the AHRC funded project 'Using the arts to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 among India's Indigenous and Nomadic communities'. This is crucial so that the emergence of the digital as a primary cultural space, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, does not obliterate marginalised communities in terms of their livelihood, cultural heritage and identity. During the original project, a collective of indigenous theatre practitioners and filmmakers produced a series of biweekly video-podcasts in indigenous languages bringing together artistic practices with on-ground research and documentary film making techniques to highlight the experiences and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on some of India's most marginalised groups. Drawing on this project, the follow-on funding will develop of a training module for an Indigenous Creative Leadership Programme implemented in 3 community groups, aimed at translating the creative heritage of indigenous communities, and document their realities, in a digital form. This programme will be crucial to fostering innovation and enabling the long-term sustainability of their art, livelihood and knowledge base. The project will further generate a searchable archive of audio-visual material of the creative heritage of indigenous communities produced during the original AHRC project. This searchable archive will be given an active life through the production of a collaborative multimodal publication (including videos, photographs, stories, poetry) that will tell the stories of these communities with links to the original material. This will enable the experiences of these groups to feed into the understanding of the still unfurling human disaster of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of the structural and historical mechanisms of marginalisation of India's indigenous communities. It will also give visibility to indigenous expressions strengthening their creative economies. Finally, the project will build on the current project to enable an exchange of experiences of similarly located groups (indigenous community groups and leaders internationally) to develop an understanding of the particularlity of the experiences of indigenous communities in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This will be through an international conference involving indigenous communities and groups that have been addressing the implications of the pandemic on these communities, their creative practices and their place in the creative economy.