INDIA TODAY: PROYECTO INFANCIA
Along with Proyecto Infancia, a non-profit organization working from Madrid, we realized photography workshop involving children from different and disadvantage backgrounds and with cultural context in three different places of India: New Delhi, Varanasi and Dharamsala.
Photography is an artistic expression but it is also an instrument of memory that allows us to create, register and recognize cultural contexts, believes and values in different times and societies. Today’s India is becoming the power with the youngest population. But without reforming the health, education and vocational training, this advantage is likely to turn into a disaster. All the pictures in this movie were taken by children between 8 and 10 years.
In India we realized three different workshops collaborating with locals associations. The first workshop was made in New Delhi with the former Street Children of Paharganj, in collaboration with Salaam Baalak Trust. We worked in a 24-hours full shelter that provide to kids security and a sense of home, restoring the childhood in children. The second one was realized in the Badi Asha school, founded in Varanasi by the association Learn for Life to give a primary education to children coming from poor families. We realized the third workshop in McLeod Ganj in the TCV, where we worked with kids refugees in Dharamsala from Tibet. Here they grow up togheter and learn to be indipendent. The children receive all that they need: house, food, clothes, medical cares, physical trainig and especially a complete education, moral values, hope and a cultural identity. They live in an harmonic community in the peace of mountains, but separated from their families and far from their homeland. The children involved come from particular social contexts and specific cultural backgrounds. Through their eyes and by their pictures we have the opportunity to observe the reality from a point of view that we have forgotten, to see the world from a disenchanted perspective. These pictures, taken in their normal surroundings, tell us their daily lifes alomng with hidden stories.
Proyecto Infancia is a non-profit organization working from Madrid, Spain. Its main work is to organize photography workshops for groups of children between 7 and 15 years old, from disadvantage backgrounds in different countries, especially developing countries.
