Serendipity Arts Festival | Statement on Accessibility and Inclusion

As Serendipity advances to its fourth edition, our commitment to producing meaningful accessibility for our audiences grows stronger. We’re pleased to share that the 2018 edition of the Festival included ramps and wheelchairs at all venues, and shuttle facilities to navigate between venues.

Bringing accessibility to the core of a multi-disciplinary arts festival presents many opportunities to learn, dialogue, and transform––as much ourselves, as our visitors. One of the greatest learning experiences has been our collaboration with Access for ALL in each edition of the Festival. Siddhant Shah has created a custom programme for the Festival titled “Senses,” which is a cornerstone of our accessibility-driven programming. “Senses” uses a holistic approach that includes art reproduced in braille, braille site maps and signage, and sensitisation workshops along with curated walks for the differently-abled. The workshops conducted at the 2018 edition of the Festival included Gond Mask Painting, Puppets of Goa, Found it, Print it, Crafty Clay, Blind Fold Painting, Decoupage Postcard Design, and Warli painting.

But we’re just getting started!

As we work towards building the Festival programme for 2019, which will also include an extensive Senses programme (details can be viewed here) we hope to include initiatives that can enrich public understandings of mental health––a growing concern in India. While our venues will continue to explore more sustainable and efficient ways to foster physical accessibility, we also hope to address the dynamics of mental well-being, and build substantive dialogue between personal narratives, lived experiences, and clinical frameworks. Engaging with stakeholders and developing programmatic interventions which accommodate diverse experiences and subvert standard notions of mental disorders, both transitory and chronic, will be a focus of our efforts at the Festival in 2019.