With Circular Creative Companions, Colomboscope addresses the growing need for standardised procedures, exhibition strategies, and sustainable design in South Asian arts initiatives, including festivals, galleries, museums, artist-led studios, and gathering spaces, promoting environmentally conscious practices in exhibition displays, artwork logistics, and production. The project brings together diverse creative stakeholders to promote conscious planning in studio logistics, shared workshop facilities, and circular approaches to display production.
Circular Creative Companions will prioritise,
Learning, Innovation, and Peer-to-Peer Mentorship through the project’s first phase, which focuses on learning initiatives and mentorship, particularly for practitioners and students of design and architecture interested in exhibition-making and alternative spatial design. The 4-day workshop focuses on harnessing practices of circular use through the arts, spatial as well as logistical planning in relation to environmental factors, ecological study, and community-oriented mentorship across maker spaces and creative studios in Colombo. 10 young cultural producers will have access to hands-on training and expert sessions to approach their future work in the arts and spatial practice, tracing sustainability values as well as ecological impact.
Reimagining Exhibition Infrastructure is the second phase, where the central outcome is the development of a modular display system, accompanied by a practical manual. This unit will be shared on an in-kind basis with the wider Sri Lankan arts community, including artist-led studios, foundations, art schools, museums, galleries, and universities. The system is designed to travel across festivals and institutions, encouraging the re-circulation of spatial design practices and low-waste exhibition making. To ensure widespread accessibility through open access, the manual will be distributed to Colomboscope’s institutional partners and educational libraries across South Asia and beyond. It will also be made available online for free download.
Circular Creative Companions is made possible through the British Council’s Climate Futures South Asia grant.
The Climate Futures South Asia Grant is a bold, artist-led initiative supporting creative solutions to the climate crisis through grants, mentorship, and global collaboration. It empowers artists and organisations to reimagine the arts for a sustainable future, driving climate action and resilience across the creative sector.
Facilitators & Discussants
