Response from Nimi Ravindran from Sandbox Collective:  We are a women's led arts collective, and our work focuses largely on gender issues. In March 2020 when we went into a lockdown, we realised how even the pandemic played out differently for different genders. Internationally we heard that domestic violence escalated, our friends in the theatre were fund raising for transgender people and sex workers who had no way of coping with with a calamity. It was a testing time for women and gender minorities, we at Sandbox wanted to do something that involved something tangible, we remembered how we passed chits in class in school (and go into trouble with teachers) and decided to pass these journals around town for people to write/draw/paint/ their gender stories. And interdisciplinary artist Deepikah Bharadwaj was our immediate choice to collaborate with us and curate this project. 

Response from Deepikah: Building on that idea, we named the project Rest your thoughts here (RYTH): The Gender Chronicles. Not a very convenient name, but we wanted to invite people to just take a breath and put down their thoughts in the journals. There was no expectation or benchmark, even a small note or scribble was welcome. We sprinkled the journals with some prompts like- "emotional achaar (pickle)" , "sometimes I wonder" etc. amongst other arbid collages to break the formidableness of a blank page. We wanted to create a safe space through the RYTH boxes which travelled the town carrying the journals, art supplies, markers, some candy, etc 

It's a little difficult to say the exact number. Many people wrote multiple entries, anonymously. Sometimes the journals passed through a house party and everyone wrote in it. There were about 7 of these that circulated in different parts of the city. We tried our best for the journals to not be an echo chamber for only the most popular narratives around gender and sexuality. The lockdowns were a deterrent in these books travelling beyond the urban youth population, but, we did manage to get a few varied perspectives. 

We did an online collaborative event using a MIRO (whiteboard) board where people contributed live. Anecdotes spoke to other anecdotes, it was a beautiful and fulfilling to experience this. How much people would love to share their thoughts and life if they only got the space to do it. 

Yes. We hope this will be an ongoing project that will, in its next phase, be a hybrid version and encompass both a physical as well as an online version. The physical exhibition will take place next year and we will be open to online submissions that could include anything from art, design, text, video, audio etc.