Project 560 (April 2026 onwards)

Bangalore! What’s Beyond the Pincode?

 

Imagine Bangalore as a poet’s journal, a creative coder’s kernel,

an artist’s studio, a filmmaker’s edit table, a performer’s floor!

Tune into the city's emerging voices from diverse communities, hidden spaces,

multi-layered histories, collective aspirations

Project 560 is reimagined as an artistic provocation to look beyond the familiar hubs

and zoom into the peripheries with layered pasts, chaotic present times,

unimagined futures of a rapidly mutating metropolis

If you want to creatively enquire how we navigate our shared futures,

Project 560 is our collaborative playground

Collective Reimagination of the City 

Bangalore is expanding at a pace that is hard to capture. The creative vitality of Bangalore is on the move. It thrives in unexpected corners, like urban villages, “found communities”, movements of gig workers, migrant corridors, maker spaces, reading groups, pencil jammers and informal creative economies.

Project 560  now switches to an immersive, incubation-led journey with experts and practitioners in the city.

IFA is looking for Bangalore-based artists/ researchers who wish to develop creative ideas through conversations with a cohort of like-minded creative practitioners. These conversations will enrich your imaginations about neighbourhood interventions, tactical urbanist impulses, year-long curatorial visions throughout the city, or artistic research on the city.  

Project 560 is reimagined as a peer network that nurtures raw intent, ideas that are nascent, unprecedented, risky, with creative agility, and sensitivity to Bangalore’s everyday frictions, including its multilingual realities, its complex caste, language and gender dynamics, and the critical environmental narratives shaping our urban ecology. A cohort that will continue thinking with one another long after the project period ends.

IFA seeks to implement incubation-led Arts Projects in Bangalore that critically engage with the city's pasts, presents, and futures. Collaborative projects that bring together artists and scholars are also encouraged. Through shared dialogues, explorations, walks, workshops and peer exchange the project will develop unfold over a period of 8 months.

Outcomes of the projects could variously include literary arts, graphic narratives, animations, creative non-fiction, musical explorations, performing arts, lecture performances, exhibitions, site-responsive installations, creative coding bootcamps, synthjamming, artistic research monographs, essay films or interdisciplinary works. The presentation of these outcomes must be public and in physical format, with virtual elements in part, if necessary.

Enriching Collaborative Engagement with the City

Whether your practice looks like a hyperlocal neighbourhood intervention, a rigorous artistic research monograph, or a collective curatorial project, Project 560 values your process. Project 560 wants to encourage breaking out of usual creative bubbles to jam and collaborate across different artistic practices and networks.

To keep this cultural ecosystem alive, interactive, and community-driven, this cycle of Project 560  will actively engage with the city through a series of events alongside the implemented projects. We wish to encourage informal gatherings, place-making for multilingual hangouts, fireside chats, peer sharing, and continuous dialogue.

Open public reiterations designed to restage earlier projects, to reactivate Project 560 archives with diverse communities.

From storytelling walks to ecocritical essay films, climate fiction, and site-responsive art, Project 560 is an open call to inspire Bangalore to question, and rewrite itself.

Namma 560. Namma Project. Namma Ooru.

Following a Voices from the Field report on the impact of the programme since 2018, a Project 560 festival across multiple venues in the city, and two roundtables with urbanists, architects, artists, a programme evaluation in late 2025 led by an external panel of experts, Mamta Sagar, Sharanya Ramprakash, Abhisheka Krishnagopal, and Naveen Mahantesh, offered a series of recommendations for Project 560. The current programme has been shaped by the collective recommendations from this process.

For all queries regarding the application process, incubation cycles, or to pitch an open-ended idea, e-mail us at john@indiaifa.org