Sunday 10 February 2008

Exploring the 'Market'

by Salil Konkar

Over the course of a month or so, for the ‘Market’ project, some of us from the combined Siolim Diaries and GoCreat group made trips to the Wednesday market in Siolim and spoke to a few of the local vendors there - two women selling coconuts and brooms, another selling pottery that she makes at home. While talking to the potter (Luisa) we asked her if we could some see her at her workplace while she was working - she was most willing, and a week later, on 8th February, we were at her place interviewing her while watching her making the pots. She took us around and also showed us the kiln where she fires the pots and her other clay ware. We learnt that besides selling at the Siolim market on Wednesdays, she also sells in the Calangute market that runs on Saturdays.

On Saturday 9th February, we were at the Calangute market. We saw Luisa sitting close to the entrance of the market, with more stuff than she brings to sell at Siolim (sales are better at Calangute because of the larger tourist crowds there). We walked through the crowded market amidst the loud yelling of fisherwomen and vegetable vendors, and the mechanical sound of a machine pressing juice out of sugarcane.

Having gathered some raw material for making a short film, the next thing on our minds was – how do we put all this together? That’s when we found out about the Centre for Digital Storytelling, based out of Berkeley California, which conducts workshops in digital storytelling, and which has also published on their site a ‘cookbook’ for conducting similar workshops. We found the techniques that they used most interesting and decided to follow them to learn digital storytelling as a group. This would provide the group with a platform to learn and experiment with basic film-making techniques as well as build the capabilities within the group to digitally document village stories in an audiovisual format, which has been one of the objectives of the Siolim Diaries project.

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