The Story
OrganizerThe India Foundation for the Arts has been one of India's most rigorous arts grant-makers since 1993, operating primarily as a behind-the-scenes institution — funding artists and researchers, not building public-facing audiences. Project 560, launched in 2014, was an experiment in doing something different: connecting IFA's support for artistic inquiry to the city it calls home, using Bengaluru's own neighbourhoods as the subject, the site, and the audience.
The starting point was a practical observation. IFA's research into performance spaces in Indian cities had revealed that most of the affordable, publicly accessible infrastructure was in poor condition, while high-quality venues were prohibitively expensive. Many performance artists had responded by developing their work in found spaces — libraries, cafes, bridges, parks. Project 560 formalised this impulse as a grant category: artists could apply to make work that engaged with a specific Bengaluru neighbourhood, using the neighbourhood itself as the performance and exhibition site.
Over its first several years, Project 560 supported close to 50 projects. The range was deliberately broad: oral histories of retired public sector workers in a deindustrialising neighbourhood; citizen science projects in Lalbagh; cinematic histories of Laggere; sound mapping of Cubbon Park. The connective thread was the question each project was implicitly asking: what does this part of the city know about itself, and what does it not yet know?
The Project 560 Festival emerged from IFA's recognition that this accumulated body of work had a public life beyond the individual project reports. Gathering the projects into a two-weekend festival allowed Bengalurians who had not participated in any individual project to encounter the collection's full scope — and to understand the city differently as a result.
Executive Director Menaka Rodriguez has described the festival's underlying purpose as creating spaces for residents to stop, pause, connect, and engage with the people who make up their neighbourhood.
Project 560 operates in a tradition of community-engaged arts practice that has deep roots in Indian alternative theatre and the Sangeet Natak Akademi's folk documentation work, but applies it to the specific conditions of a 21st-century tech-boom city navigating rapid demographic and spatial transformation. Bengaluru has received more internal migration than almost any other Indian city over the past three decades; for a large proportion of its residents, the city's older neighbourhoods and histories are unfamiliar or invisible.
IFA's grant framework has generated documentation and artistic responses to parts of Bengaluru — Rajajinagar, Laggere, Byatarayanapura, Majestic — that mainstream cultural programming rarely touches. The festival makes this visible as a collective body of knowledge rather than isolated project outputs.
The BNP Paribas India Foundation's support reflects growing recognition from international financial institutions of the cultural value of place-based arts documentation in rapidly urbanising cities.
As Bengaluru's population continues to grow through migration, the social fabric of its older neighbourhoods is under genuine pressure. Project 560 has, over seven years, built an archive of neighbourhood knowledge that will not otherwise exist — the stories of the farmers' market at Byatarayanapura, the oral histories of Rajajinagar's industrial past, the bird life of Cubbon Park and Lalbagh. The festival is the public face of that archive.
Project 560 has effectively pioneered the systematic use of arts grants to document urban neighbourhood change in a major Indian city, producing a body of work that crosses the boundary between artistic practice and social science.
