Drawing the Everyday

What can a few lines, a handful of words and a simple visual gag reveal about the world around us? For over a decade, Rachita Taneja’s Sanitary Panels has used the apparent simplicity of the stick figure and the immediacy of satire to take on questions of gender, sexuality, caste, discrimination, politics and power. Her comics often begin with something seemingly familiar (a news story, an everyday interaction, a social assumption) and reduce it to its essential contradiction, allowing the absurdity of the system behind it to come into view. In this hands-on workshop, participants will experiment with this process of reduction: taking a complex question around identity or social belonging and translating it into a short comic. Through writing, sequencing, dialogue, visual economy and satire, they will explore how much (and how little) a comic needs to say.