The city as a living archive: Kolkata hosts fifth edition of ‘The City as a Museum’

Kolkata’s streets, riverbanks and landmarks turned into sites of inquiry and performance as The City as a Museum returned to the city for its fifth edition. Organised by DAG, the annual festival unfolded between December 6 and 15, tracing how architecture, migration, labour and everyday use have shaped the city’s present through a series of walks, performances, talks and installations. This year’s edition placed architectural landmarks at the centre of its exploration. As a prelude, the festival travelled to Santiniketan in late November, offering participants access to Kala Bhavana, Uttarayan and the Ashrama complexes, as well as terracotta temples along the Ajoy river, to examine the evolution of a modernist architectural language influenced by multiple historic styles. In Kolkata, the festival moved across eight sites, drawing on research by scholars including Tapati Guha Thakurta, Aishika Chakraborty, Kaustubh Mani Sengupta and Saptarshi Sanyal. Programmes ranged from a sensory walk around Nakhoda Masjid and a reflective exploration of Sealdah station’s “politics of waiting”, to an Esplanade walk tracing the city’s cinema-viewing culture through its Art Deco theatres. One of the most discussed events was By the Bastions, a cruise along the Hooghly that examined how the construction of New Fort William reshaped the riverfront from the perspective of migrant and maritime workers. The discussion was followed by a performance by the Arko Mukherjee Quartet, linking musical traditions to histories of labour and displacement. An itinerant pop-up installation inside a blue-and-yellow Kolkata bus accompanied the festival across sites, curated by Sumantra Mukherjee and Pavel Paul. The bus functioned as a moving bioscope, using video, drawings and posters to foreground ephemeral, everyday histories embedded in the city’s built environment. Across formats- guided walks, conversations, performances and mapping exercises—the fifth edition resisted singular narratives, instead placing audiences in shifting vantage points to relook at familiar landmarks. By doing so, the festival once again positioned Kolkata itself as a museum—dynamic, layered and continually in the making.