Taahira’s Serendipitous Journey to Participatory Video
At the start of the year, I spent six weeks interviewing local Tamil women and exploring culinary traditions in the North of Sri Lanka. This region is historically recognised as the home ground of Tamil Eelam, a homeland envisioned by the Tamil people. My research grant, sponsored by the CONDEV program for Peace & Conflict, was to investigate the possibility of home cooking tours as a means of social healing and tourism regeneration.
This idea was inspired by a home-cooking experience I began with my mother called Spice Zi Kitchen in Singapore in July 2019. Since its inception, I’ve noticed how the interactions between foreigners and my mum have helped her build her confidence and sense of ownership around her culture and heritage. It was beautiful.
As part of my research, I spoke with and cooked alongside twelve different local women on the potential of this idea. I used participatory action research as my methodology, involving myself and the participants to collaborate on social issues and take actions to bring about social change. As a consequence of the war, many women had lost social and economic capital – access to their land and their ways of cooking because of the bombardment of fields, pastures and wild stock. The north of Sri Lanka was far less visited than the south because of the thirty-year war between the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and the Sri Lankan Army.
In my case, I was curious if cooking and sharing traditional recipes could be a form of social healing for the women, who were the sole breadwinners and custodians of Tamil food culture. Their role in the kitchen was not perfunctory but purposeful, because they had stories to tell of the dishes they cooked and how they made them. There was also a potential for this experience to give foreigners who visited them, a wider context of the destinations they are visiting by cooking with and alongside these local women.
Half a year later, it was serendipitous when in August 2024, I learned about InsightShare and its work on participatory video through Tania Ocampo-García, a mutual friend on an online community platform, The Bloom.
Through our conversations, I had a brief introduction to participatory video as a tool for documentation, advocacy, monitoring and evaluation and so much more.
After working in communications for the last 6 years, the perspective of participatory video was radical. The idea that the writer and or the producer would no longer control or shape the narrative challenged my traditional notions of storytelling.
It was this curiosity that led me to apply for Tania’s role as she went on to pursue her PhD. The interview process was honest, transparent and two-way. I took a quick liking to my line manager, Soledad Muniz (Sole), who had been working for the organisation for the last 15 years. I was inspired by her journey from Buenos Aires, Argentina to London, United Kingdom, where she now lives with multi-ethnic and multi-religious family.
My first two months into InsightShare were very much Action, Reflection, Action – where I was entrusted to co-lead and co-facilitate projects with Sole.
One of the first projects I played the role of technical facilitator was for an Online participatory video course for a group of 5 people from all over the world. The group was a dynamic mix of filmmakers, content producers and researchers for various NGOs and independent production houses. As the technical facilitator, I experienced the course as a participant and also the behind-the-scenes action of seeing which tools, articles and resources Sole used for the course content.
Throughout the process, I felt deep gratitude towards Sole for entrusting me with what I needed to do without micro-managing me, and giving me opportunities to speak up and guide the cohort at some points of the course, even though it was my first time.
Doing the online PV course was really helpful in understanding how the concepts of participatory video actually worked. Through listening to the ideas of the participants, and thinking through my own project in Sri Lanka, I started to imagine how I could use PV for my personal projects. Unlike traditional storytelling, the purpose of PV isn’t only the end product. The process of working together to document a story or to speak to different people is as important. It is refreshing to think about storytelling in this way. PV reinstates agency to those who are telling their stories and allows them to decide for themselves what they want to show or not.
Later on, in November, I also experienced a deeper nuance of participatory video during a project in which we are supporting a consortium of organisations including international and national NGOs in Afghanistan.
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As someone who lived in Pakistan for almost a year in 2014, I knew that the media coverage of any given situation is not quite as representative as the one spoken by the local people living in the place. The Taliban have been increasingly reducing the rights of women in the country so it is easy to assume that women must be suppressed and out of sight.
However, the use of diverse participatory art forms including video in this project, through exercises like River of Life and poetry writing, revealed powerful ways through which art can indeed transcend language and socio-political conditions. At the end of each session, I always marvelled at how brave, bold and articulate the participants were in expressing themselves even in a climate of fear and oppression.
After only a few months at InsightShare, I feel a slow awakening of a new side of me that has begun to unconsciously unravel without traditional terminology, which is moving me into a new direction in my practice. I’m curious to see where our future projects will take me, and in which ways I could continue to support and show solidarity to local voices around the world.