Lets Take a Walk is the 2nd phase of the community art project 'In Our Village' that was conducted in Horapavita, a town in the South of Sri Lanka. After the initial attention on a town away from Colombo Theertha's focus shifted to the more cosmopolitan and urban enviroment and its dwellers. Lets Take a Walk is a program that involves children from all walks of life and creating a art enviroment through art workshops to interact and learn from each other emphaising the idea that 'everyone is equal'. Allowing to freely express, the workshop enviroment encourage learning from each other and re-discovering  and understanding the socio-cultural enviroments of their living. This is a program with four interconnected projects. It’s mainly an art project with a strong focus on environment awareness. At the same time it is also a heritage awareness project along with strong educational ephasis based on creativity. The intended  outcome of the program is that at the end the participating children, and hopefully their parents will have a sense of belonging in a creative manner imbued with a sense of history and heritage on the urban environment they live in.

The project is focused on rediscovering the city and the urban landscape from historical, environmental and heritage perspectives.
Participating children will do this by drawing the city’s cultural map through identifying its environmental problems, its past and present heritage, in the way they define their city in these terms. Children will be taken through art and heritage walks in the city making them remember and identify the old buildings, important places, beautiful places, popular places, shrines as well as identifying natural environments that needs preserving and acknowledging. The workshops will address their conceptions and perceptions of environment, heritage, and past. What this means is that the children will be stimulated to first think about these on their own at the warehouse, and they will record them in their paintings. Then we will encourage discussions among the children on various aspects represented in the art works in relation to the key terms of the projects. Once when we do city tours with the children their conceptions of what they registered in their art works as history, heritage, environment will be negotiated with the realities of the perceptions of the very things that they thought about when they did the art works.

The selected area of holding the project is 'Maradana', part of the financial district of Colombo where storehouses of the government granaries were located in the 20th ceuntury. It is also a trade centure and vibrant city during the Colonial rule.

Artwork shops will be held to facilitate them to draw what they feel important in the form of maps which would introduce them the idea of mapping and also allow them to use their imagination in creative  and constructive ways.  The whole process would make the children sensitive to the contemporary cultural and natural environments of the city and make them know, value and acknowledge what is taken for granted in their own immediate environments. Warehouse Project is collaborating with Theertha in holding workshops of 'Lets Take a Walk'. 

Work process:

There were number of workshops held with the children from Maradana area at the Warehouse Project buidling.