Communities of Choice is an India-Wales collaborative project between Chennai Photo Biennale Foundation, India and @ffotogallery in Wales. As part of this partnership, students from CEPT, Ahmedabad, India were invited to respond to a task set by the Foundation Art & Design course at UWTSD, Swansea, Wales, focussing on the idea of space in the context of community. The UWTSD Foundation students were then invited to respond to these ideas and concepts in a process of creative exchange. 

The CEPT students provided a rich body of source material to work with, prompting some interesting conversations and debates rooted in the conceptual and process-based explorations the work provoked. Having recently decided upon their specialism, each of the UWTSD Foundation Students were asked to respond to the work of the students from CEPT with their own discipline in mind, resulting in some intriguing and thought-provoking outcomes, with each student beginning to discover their creative path through an intensive, week-long period of creative experimentation. 

Ranging in discipline from fine art, textiles, ceramics, product design, crafts, illustration and graphics to photography, the resulting outcomes capture many things, as is the case with any collective experience, perhaps best expressed in the following stream of consciousness:

a moment; a response; a question; an answer; a thought; an action; a memory; a history; a virtual space; a physical space; a poem; a connection; a feeling; an adjustment; a playfulness; an uncertainty; a secret; a domesticity; a human; an animal; an alien; a longing; a belonging; an expectation; a beginning; a middle; an end...

mid-conversation, across thousands of miles.