Ravista Mehra
3rd Wrld
Redefining the 3RD WRLD Ravista & Zarna
Panel: National Story
We will share our practice of curating and publishing verbal and visual stories, as an act of heritage-remembering and archive building in the post-colonial context. The paper will include an introduction to our platforms, 3rd Wrld and Broken Englizh, and a case study of one of our most recent projects ‘Keep in Touch’.
There are physical and metaphorical places that give meaning to the word ‘home’, a home that goes to define our individual cultures and histories as peoples. The collaboration between 3RD WRLD and Broken Englizh facilitated the expression of what home, culture and history meant to the Open Call’s participants, hailing from Tanzania, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, the Caribbean Islands, Brazil, Chile, Albania, and India, to name a few. The Open Call had two parts; published written stories on Broken Englizh’s blog and a 17 artist group show, ‘Keep in Touch’, at Host of Leyton, in November 2023.
The writers and visual storytellers spoke to the ways in which their ideas of home and heritage have been challenged, misconstrued and transformed in the post-colonial reality of today. These stories addressed layers of ethnicity, race, class, nature, migration, social structures, disability, and heterosexist normatives through the first person, lived experience.
This initiative is based on the belief that it is the smaller, personal, seemingly ‘insignificant’ stories that have the power to humanise, empower and repair the broken dignity of a larger people or place. By working alongside these creatives in an effort to publish and exhibit both written and visual work, we are confronting the gaps that exist in the wider art and literary industries of the West.
Together, 3RD WRLD and Broken Englizh run this non-profit programme annually to celebrate diversity and encourage dialogue on the fundamental concept of shared histories and human experience.
Ravista Mehra is an Educator and Visual Storyteller based between New Delhi and London. She has a BFA in Graphic Design, and Comparative Literature & Creative Writing from the Rhode Island School of Design. And an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art.
As a creative practitioner her design practice lies in decolonising the human narrative through the interdisciplinary fields of graphic design, experiential design, and post-colonial history. Mehra was chosen as one of the top 20 designers under the age of 35 in India, by DesignxDesign in January 2024 for her ongoing research and work in human conscious storytelling, through projects Broken Englizh and Icons of People of Colour. Currently Mehra is teaching at a few universities like Royal College of Art, Kingston and Falmouth in London, is Co-CEO of MRKT, an art selling platform for the art-curious, and is Founder of South Asian Salon, a community platform for connecting, uplifting and promoting creatives of South Asian descent.