Recipients of the Inaugural VM Salgaocar Fellowship Grants 2022

Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts is pleased to announce the recipients of the first edition of VM Salgaocar Fellowship Grants 2022.

 

In our commitment to building a more inclusive and critically engaged society, a key area of our work at Sunaparanta has been to support cultural operators producing work that stimulate cultures of change. We received eleven applications from practitioners that included academics, filmmakers, researchers, contemporary artists, theatre professionals, and writers. We appreciated the diversity of subjects and research that is presently underway to advance scholarship in the region. After a rigorous selection process, we decided to award the grants to two candidates - Afrah Shafiq and Nalini Elvino De Souza.

 

This grant recognises the outstanding achievements of those creative professionals who have been instrumental in bringing forth critical new projects, and whose work contributes to the enrichment of our creative landscape.

 

Contemporary artist Afrah Shafiq will continue her research into cultural relations between the Soviet Union and India during the Cold War years, with specific attention to the proliferation of children’s illustrated books that were translated into several Indian languages and disseminated all over the country. She will be working on an interactive fiction imagined as an anthology using interactive multimedia, video, illustrated book-form, comics, written text, archival images, original artwork and sound.

 

Filmmaker and educator Nalini Elvino de Sousa is currently studying in Aveiro University and is a part of the project Liber|Sound dedicated to connecting the archives of shellac discs in Goa, Mozambique, Brazil and Portugal and the political, aesthetic and social importance of the repertoire they safeguard. As part of the project, she intends to produce a documentary that portrays the sensitive transition of Goa as a Portuguese territory into a state of the Indian Union which is expressed in the musical repertoires performed by Goan tiatrists who lived between the 1920s and the 2000s.

 

Afrah Shafiq is a multi/new media artist based out of Goa, India. Her work moves across various mediums drawing from the handmade language of traditional folk forms and connecting them to the digital language of the Internet and video games. She also works as a teacher, illustrator, animator, video editor and producer on various projects in the world of documentary film, visual arts and the internet. When she is not glued to her computer, she makes glass mosaic.

 

Nalini Elvino de Sousa delves wholeheartedly into projects concerning education and media. She has been directing, anchoring, and producing documentaries for RTPi - Portuguese international television and produces short films and series for local television under the banner of Lotus Film & TV Production. She is the manager and Portuguese teacher at the association Communicare Trust and is now pursuing a career as an ethnomusicologist at INETmd (Aveiro University, Portugal).