Promise to practice

Role

Participant and visual storytelling

Collaborators

TU Delft, Home of Participation

Year

2024

During September, October and November 2024, a diverse group of people came together for weekly workshops on learning about Theatre of the Oppressed as a tool to understand water justice and resilience and a ways to integrate it in our respective creative journeys. The idea was to collectively learn and critically reflect on the Dutch water sector at large and the role of international knowledge transfers and its impact on everyday realities in the ‘global south’ regions it is implemented in. 

Mixed backgrounds and perspectives led to interesting discussions and expressions on what water justice looks and feels like. As I look back on these weeks of us coming together, I realise that the participation of people from the so called ‘global north’ and ‘global south’ did add a lot of meaning to a project such as this. However, it was very important to stress on and constantly acknowledge our privileged positionalites as researchers in the Netherlands. Coming from the dominant, privileged caste within the highly unequal and stratified society in India, it was an injustice in itself to represent or speak for what water injustice means back home. However, through the sessions, what worked was to deliberate from within our experiences and extend that to injustices borne by people we have interacted with or have had opportunities to work with, and how these can be spoken for. The final presentation was a case in South India depicting the impact of solutions created by ‘Dutch knowledge experts’, on the livelihoods of fisherfolk. The role of protests and the ways in which resistance manifests and how solutions can be collectively made, was the main point of discussion during the interactive theatre presentation.