Interview with Safurat Balogun & Miriam Bruns
© Sijya Gupta
There are so many questions about storytelling, that start much before a page is turned. In this interview with Safurat Balogun, the Head of Library Services at the Goethe-Institut in New Delhi, and Miriam Bruns, Director, Goethe-Institut, Pune, the two collaborators explore their idea of storytelling and narrative practices.
strong>How and when did the idea of Once Upon a Tomorrow come about? What compelled the Goethe-Institut in two different cities to collaborate on something like this?
BALOGUN: The way it works at the Goethe-Institut is that each year, everyone is invited to pitch an idea for a project. For me, the idea emerged after I watched a German news programme broadcast on one of the prominent TV channels. It was a panel talking about Black people — and there wasn’t a single Black person on that panel. I’d been thinking about representation for quite some time now; and especially after I moved to Delhi a few years ago. I was constantly asked about whether I felt comfortable living here, and I thought that we should talk about diversity; not just in the Indian context, but the South Asian one too. I’m keen about storytelling and the narrative forms, and there is always that question about who is allowed to tell stories, and how. When I submitted the idea, we found out that there were a few other storytelling ideas from the Library Departments in other centres as well. We found a way to merge those ideas, and that led me to join Miriam and her Library Department in Pune.
BRUNS: What was interesting to us as a department was that in South Asia, there are so many forms of storytelling in the subcontinent. So, is it even a profession here? We ask this because in Germany, while there is a culture of storytelling there, it is not such a well-known and respected profession. Every library department at the Goethe-Institut has worked with local talents and experts across formats, from the written to the oral traditions, from paintings to shadow puppetry; we wanted to bring them together, along with some experts from Germany and Europe, to explore the questions surrounding storytelling, from communication, to ownership, to representation.
So, this project is an experiment — let’s put them in a room together and see what comes out of it, and what would they advise us to do next.
What is the way forward for the Goethe-Institut after Once Upon a Tomorrow ends?
BALOGUN: We really want to do a ‘Festival of Ideas’ with the different departments of the Goethe-Institut, where there are several programs in the course of a day or a week, both online and offline. I’m hoping we can take the learnings from Once Upon a Tomorrow and use them when we’re planning projects about storytelling — and even go beyond storytelling. Now that we have a team of co-collaborators who went through this process together, we have the opportunity to create properties and projects with them in the future.
BRUNS: I’m looking forward to the recommendations we will receive from the project facilitator, Dr Shah, and from each of the narrative experts. It’ll be exciting to see the ways in which we can use them concretely in future programs and make sure that the general audience can also benefit from these recommendations.
BALOGUN: The way it works at the Goethe-Institut is that each year, everyone is invited to pitch an idea for a project. For me, the idea emerged after I watched a German news programme broadcast on one of the prominent TV channels. It was a panel talking about Black people — and there wasn’t a single Black person on that panel. I’d been thinking about representation for quite some time now; and especially after I moved to Delhi a few years ago. I was constantly asked about whether I felt comfortable living here, and I thought that we should talk about diversity; not just in the Indian context, but the South Asian one too. I’m keen about storytelling and the narrative forms, and there is always that question about who is allowed to tell stories, and how. When I submitted the idea, we found out that there were a few other storytelling ideas from the Library Departments in other centres as well. We found a way to merge those ideas, and that led me to join Miriam and her Library Department in Pune.
BRUNS: What was interesting to us as a department was that in South Asia, there are so many forms of storytelling in the subcontinent. So, is it even a profession here? We ask this because in Germany, while there is a culture of storytelling there, it is not such a well-known and respected profession. Every library department at the Goethe-Institut has worked with local talents and experts across formats, from the written to the oral traditions, from paintings to shadow puppetry; we wanted to bring them together, along with some experts from Germany and Europe, to explore the questions surrounding storytelling, from communication, to ownership, to representation.
So, this project is an experiment — let’s put them in a room together and see what comes out of it, and what would they advise us to do next.
What is the way forward for the Goethe-Institut after Once Upon a Tomorrow ends?
BALOGUN: We really want to do a ‘Festival of Ideas’ with the different departments of the Goethe-Institut, where there are several programs in the course of a day or a week, both online and offline. I’m hoping we can take the learnings from Once Upon a Tomorrow and use them when we’re planning projects about storytelling — and even go beyond storytelling. Now that we have a team of co-collaborators who went through this process together, we have the opportunity to create properties and projects with them in the future.
BRUNS: I’m looking forward to the recommendations we will receive from the project facilitator, Dr Shah, and from each of the narrative experts. It’ll be exciting to see the ways in which we can use them concretely in future programs and make sure that the general audience can also benefit from these recommendations.
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