Thoughts and Reflections: Two weeks at IVS

This month, my siblings and I had the amazing opportunity to spend two weeks at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVS). We had joined their Crossover Program, which was a program for students aged fifteen to nineteen years. The full program consisted of four weeks, but students could choose to join any of the courses, so we had signed up for the last two weeks.

The first week that I attended – which was actually week 3 of the complete program – was on space and architecture, called ‘Space Odysseys’. It started with an introduction to space and how we see it, in relation to our own selves. There were several interesting presentations, numerous discussions, and even field trips that focused around the topic of space. Although there were a lot of things that we had already seen, this course provided a new angle of looking at them.

This course was led by four instructors – Dr. Suneela Ahmed, Ms. Natasha Mukarram, Ms. Rakhshaan Qazi and Sir Usman Ansari. All of them belonged to this field professionally, and were also faculty members at IVS. It felt like a privilege to be working under their supervision, as it is not every day that one has the opportunity to learn something from the expert of that field itself. What was even more encouraging was the fact that despite being so well accomplished, these people were quite humble and friendly with us, taking complicated concepts and explaining them at our level, answering every question as if it was of great importance and valuing what each student had to say, even if it wasn’t much. Their friendly approach dissolved any barriers that typically come between teachers and students, which made us feel quite at home in their classroom.

There were two field trips – one was a visit to a nearby mall, and the other was a day trip to Old Karachi. There was clearly a huge difference between these two spaces, and we had several discussions on what made each space different from the other. One assignment that we had related to this exercise was to create a visual comparison between the two, and then present it to the class.

There were several other activities too, that, apart from being fun to do, gave us a lot to think about. 

One such activity was to create different spaces using furniture from the classroom. All of the students were divided into two groups, and they were asked to use furniture such as wooden chairs, stools and writing boards to create any kind of space that a person could walk through, using them. We could also use art supplies and any other materials at hand to add visual effects to it. This turned out to be a very interesting exercise, as it encouraged us to think quickly and come up with creative ideas for spaces, as they hadn’t provided us with any specific guidelines to follow.

The first space that our group created was a walk-through maze that we assembled using mostly chairs, plus a few wooden stools and a whiteboard for an arch-like entrance to it. Our teachers walked through it and commented on what they thought they liked about it. Then they gave us some feedback and suggestions, such as a tip to add more elements that we had studied from different spaces. Then they asked us to create another space.

This time, our group decided to make a haunted-house kind of space. We made spooky signs, such as that of blood spilling, a skull and cross bone, and several ‘danger’ signs out of cardboard. Then we painted the faces of two of our group members with red and black paint. This space was also of a walk-through kind, through which anyone could pass. When it was ready, we turned off the lights and asked the teachers to start walking through it. We turned on some spooky music, and as they walked through it, someone from our team made eerie noises to frighten them. The ones who had their faces painted jumped out from behind the chairs at different points to scare them. This idea was pretty effective, and just by watching our teachers go through it, one couldn’t help laughing.

Our instructors really admired this idea, and told us what they thought about it. Then, we were asked to make one final space. This time, we came up with an idea to make an obstacle course. Using white crayons and tape, we marked the track of the course and its starting and ending point. We made small red flags out of cardboard and taped them to the starting point, to give it a slightly realistic look. Then we made obstacles out of chairs and stools, such as hurdles to crawl through and jump over. We also added some targets (paper cups) for throwing little balls into and a board with quick games like tic-tac-toe and hangman (the player had to choose one of the games to play).

We put on some workout music to set the tone, and made most of our team members sit in the surrounding chairs as spectators who cheered for the contestants. One person from our team did the commentary, while I handled the timer. We did the contest between two of the interns (Yashfeen and Warda) who were helping us and the teachers throughout the course, which turned out to be a tie! Later, when we were having a discussion about the spaces that we had created, they commented that the whole contest made it seem so realistic that they had forgotten about the fact that it was actually a space that we had created, which made it so effective.

There were dozens of other activities, tasks, presentations and discussions that we had, and it would be almost impossible to write about all of them. However, I do plan to post some of the work that I did there in separate posts.

The last week of this program was called ‘Media Crossings’, which was based on the idea of how art and technology overlap in the way that new media artists use digital technology in their work. This week consisted of thinking about and understanding complicated concepts such as identities, – who we think we are – how our social media presence influences our real life behaviour, and how our real life identities are different from our online ones.

This week was led by two amazing people – Ms. Kulsum Ebrahim, who is a professional filmmaker and Sir Asad Kamran, an artist. They were extremely friendly and gentle with everyone, and gave us complete creative freedom to do whatever we wanted to on our tasks. I especially loved the way they talked to us about different ideas, but did not try to impose their ideas on anyone and were open to listening and understanding different perspectives.

There were a lot of things that we did and talked about during this week, but one of the most significant one was the activity we did with Instagram. We talked about how, when we are online, we try to maintain a certain identity and think too much about what others would think of us before we post anything. This attitude limits us from revealing who we really are, as we are only trying to show the best parts of ourselves. Based on this idea, we were all asked to create our own pseudo Instagram accounts and post whatever we feel like on them. Since we were using fake usernames, nobody could identify who each person was – hence we would not have to worry about what our followers would think of us, since they wouldn’t know who we actually are. All of us made public accounts and then used a common hashtag on our posts (#ivsmediacrossings) that we used to find each others’ accounts. Throughout the week, all of us posted stuff that we were working on in class, our completed projects, and anything else that we felt like on those accounts. This exercise, apart from being fun, felt liberating as it allowed everyone to post their own thoughts and ideas without having to be accountable for it.

In one session of this week, we discussed the question ‘Who are you when you are online?’ Everyone had their own perspectives on this. While a few students did say ‘myself’ in response, most of us agreed with the perspective that we are not ourselves when we are online. Each person has taken on a different online identity, which does not really represent who they are in real life. With this idea, we were asked to think about our online identity, and create an emoji to represent it. The emoji could be like a mask, a painting or any other object that represented one’s online identity. Then we had to create a skit of up to sixty seconds and upload it on our Instagram accounts. I found this activity quite interesting, as while we are always busy maintaining a certain persona on our social media accounts, we hardly ever sit down to think about what it means.

Another project that we did this week was on filmmaking. After a short video editing workshop and an introduction to film production, we were assigned a group task, to make trailers of some folk tales. The students were divided into four groups, and each group was given a story (like HeerRanjha, Sohni Mahiwal and Mirza Sahiban) to make a one minute long trailer on. We could adapt the story and change the setting into a modern day one. My group had ‘Sohni Mahiwal’, which we turned into a somewhat contemporary love story. This project was super fun, yet exhausting at the same time. I found the scriptwriting to be the most difficult part of the process – which I did, in my group – because it was almost impossible to imagine what a scene that I was writing would appear to be in the actual film. Perhaps this is why movies can never be truly accurate depictions of the novels they are based on – and maybe this is also the reason why storyboards are so important in filmmaking.

Anyway, this project was very successful – each group made a very strong and powerful trailer. They were screened at the end of the last day, which was probably the highlight of the entire week. Everyone loved them! In fact, we watched all the trailers twice, because watching them just once wasn’t enough. Then each team explained their trailer and what different aspects of it were meant to symbolize, as a lot of it wasn’t clear – like most trailers, there were scenes that couldn’t be understood unless you knew the whole story.

The week ended on a high note, although we couldn’t help feeling nostalgic about leaving behind the awesome people and the place we had grown so used to over just two weeks. Of course, it was inevitable that this too, like every other thing in life, would come to an end, but it seemed like none of us were ready to let go of it. With prolonged goodbyes and plans to meet again soon, all of us departed. Yet the memories we created here will live with us forever.