Synergising with GoCreat

by Salil Konkar

Around mid-January 2008, the Siolim Diaries group decided to work with the GoCreat group to make it possible for a larger set of participants to learn multimedia and digital storytelling techniques. GoCreat was initiated by Gasper DeSouza and Alito Siqueira, and since the Siolim Diaries also involved using multimedia techniques for documenting village stories, it made sense to work together. Gasper is a photojournalist by profession and Alito is a Sociologist at Goa University who is also advisor to the Siolim Diaries project.

After spending a couple of sessions analysing and finalising which stories to tell, we decided to work on the idea of a 'Market' - the village marketplace where locals from the area come to sell a myriad of home-grown produce and handcrafted wares, how their livelihoods are getting affected by the changing trends in consumerism and the onset of large commercial supermarkets that offer similar goods at cheaper prices, what are their survival strategies, how long they’ll last...