The Children of Dust workshops and its documentation aims to track first person accounts of children from the closed coal mining city Bytom (Poland) and gold mining town of Kolar Gold Fields (India) as they discover their family stories and their relationship with the post-industrial landscape. The project is an attempt to understand these cities in economical and social transformation through the lens of micro narratives hidden in family stories.

Once hailed as great industrial feats, both Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) and Bytom are now crumbling ghost towns. The population of Bytom continues to decline with over 3,000 people leaving the city every year. Those who stay back, struggle with poverty, social problems, environmental hazards and lack of hope. Spread over 13000 acres, Kolar Gold Fields was the largest gold mines in India and the first Public sector mining company to face closure. Ever since the gold mines shut down over a decade and a half ago, over 80,000 people have left the town in search of livelihood. Out of the remaining workforce, over 20,000 people commute each day by train to Bengaluru - three hours and about 100 km away - to make a living, returning only by night.

Through arts based workshops, conducted in both these towns, we try to encourage children to probe their family stories, the relationship with their cities, and in this process build a unique narrative of their family history.

As a first step towards the realization of the project, in September 2017, we conducted an arts based workshop in Bytom that spanned across two weekends. The larger theme of the workshop was expression and storytelling, and it involved exercises that encouraged children to express their thoughts and emotions through narrative and visual art. We invited thirteen Polish children between the ages of 6yrs to 12 yrs to participate in activities that helped them talk about themselves, about their family stories and their relationship with the city's landscape.

Exploring Self, Exploring Relationships and Exploring the Landscape formed the three phases of the workshop. In the first one, the children were encouraged to talk about themselves through drawing self-portraits and visually depicting emotions they experienced. They clicked portraits of each other during a photography exercise. They also participated in a story building activity, The Biography of Things that focused on creating stories about objects that were a part of the current and historical cultural context of their city. In the second phase of the workshop the children were encouraged to talk about their families, while drawing a family tree. They narrated family anecdotes and spoke about memories related to the different members of their family. In a related exercise called: Missing Links children made a greeting card to a member of the family they miss. The final stage of the workshop explored the children relationship with the city's landscape, their immediate neighbourhood and backyards. Through making collages they built stories that related the sculptures found across the city with elements from the local surroundings. The participants of workshop also drew maps of their neighbourhood and proposed changes to their backyards.

This website is a work in progress and will remain dynamic. The next step of the Children of Dust project is to conduct a similar workshop in Kolar Gold Mines. Currently, our documentation contains the art work created by the children from Bytom. It also consists of observations and conversations that took place during the workshop, as well as the photographs and Internet materials gathered as a part of our research. The website is designed as a canvas under several themes. Photographs, texts, videos and audio narrations form the elements under each theme. While the individual elements hold meaning in themselves, they also build links with those placed around them.

Anna Okrasko and Lakshmi Karunakaran