Image credit: Project Mai-Karachi. 

Habib Afsar is a Pakistani-Swiss artist and social animator‚ with an international background in health and development. His interests are therefore broad and cover areas like cultural exchange‚  public spaces and community art‚ peace building‚ community development and arts-based research. His work is resource oriented‚ i.e. it is geared towards facilitating people to identify and utilise their internal and external resources. Currently he runs the Center for Arts-based Methodologies which focus on the use of the artistic processes towards holistic wellbeing. His artistic vision and mission is “to create safe spaces where beauty is celebrated”- and beauty is not always beautiful!

In collaboration with local artists and students, Habib sets out to explore and document the cultural spaces and dynamics of the megacity of Karachi, Pakistan. This exploration will take the form of film, audio soundscapes, photo-montages, interviews, story-telling and other aesthetic outputs that will be digitised to create a web-based “Cultural Map of Karachi”. The map aims to be useful not only to artists visiting and wanting to explore and work in the city, the ensuing dialogue with various stakeholders as they navigate the cultural-scape will also be invaluable in creating a space to bring cultural actors in community.