Thurgga Vigneswaran

About Me

My approach to socially engaged art begins with exploring a place through mapping, observation, research, and relationship-building. The discoveries made along the way shape an artistic response that is created collaboratively with the communities involved. My projects below offer a closer look at how this process unfolds in practice.
Recently, I have been exploring the idea of healthy distractions. I want to create spaces where people can, for a few hours, be elsewhere. My goal is to create spaces that allow people to pause everyday life and dive into meaningful collective art-making gatherings, with connection and community-building as the intention. Learn more about my practice here.

Just as parents can absorb the trauma and hardships of their children, communities can provide something similar for adults.

1. Footnotes From Our Ancestors

Footnotes From Our Ancestors is an ongoing participatory archive held inside an 8 × 8 cm book. Each page holds a proverb gathered through conversation with strangers from different cultures, paired with a handmade collage response on the facing page for visual interest. “Do you know a proverb?” becomes an exchange of memory, humor, advice and lived philosophy. The book becomes an informal collection of cultural memory preserved through casual encounters—and a reason to connect. Part archive, part conversation, part poetic game, Footnotes From Our Ancestors seeks out the small phrases people carry with them. Read more here.

2. A Painting By Us
(In collaboration with Bailey Flinn and Vasileia Sofroniou)

After noticing that boys occupied the sports court at Darna Children's House (an NGO in Morocco), we invited children to create art around the theme of girls in sport. Our intervention combined a playful performance with the process of creating a mural. We played, and we played badly, to show that you don’t have to be skilled, or a boy, to participate in sports. We organized girls-only games and invited both boys and girls to reclaim space on the sports court through art. The children created the sketches, and we developed the composition. They voted on the mural design, and we drew the outlines. Everyone played, and everyone painted. Read more here.

3. Hidden In 17 Syllables

Hidden in 17 Syllables is a participatory haiku project developed at Bronbeek, a museum and senior living community in the Netherlands. Originally established to commemorate Dutch colonial history, the institution has since shifted toward a more critical engagement with the colonial past. Given the serious nature of this history, the site often provoked strong opinions and emotional responses, yet visitors had
few opportunities to publicly share or exchange their perspectives. In response, the project invited participants to express their observations, reflections, and reactions through haiku. The collected poems were compiled into a handmade book. After the project failed to receive institutional approval, the book was discreetly hidden in a public space on the museum grounds. Contributors were each given a map revealing its location, creating an alternative space for reflection, discovery, and dialogue. Read the haikus here.

This concludes An Hour Elsewhere. Thanks for taking a brief detour to this page

The project concludes a three-month artisteducator residency in Tangier, carried out within the framework of the International Master Artisteducator (iMAE) program at ArtEZ University of the Arts, in collaboration with the Darna Association (Tangier), and supported by the educational, research, and dissemination activities of the UNESCO Chair’s Centre for Arts and Learning (UCAL).