Tess Joseph and Gaurav Ogale on practising care as culture at ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025

What would it mean to study 'care' as a discipline in our educational institutions—as something to be innately designed and inculcated, and not as a benign afterthought—that radicalises, influences and shapes the way we live, work and create? This suffused the ~dialog(ue) session at the National Centre for the Performing Arts’ (NCPA) Little Theatre in Mumbai, India, between visual chronicler Gaurav Ogale and casting director and producer Tess Joseph at ADFF:STIR Mumbai 2025. Under the moniker Culture of/as Care: Nurturing Humanity and the Planet through Trends, Transitions and Traditions, and as part of the architecture festival’s curated talks programme, ~log(ue), the exchange, an invitation into each other’s archives of work viewed culture from the perspective of care and reviewed it as a practice of empathy, ruminating on culture operating with care in its veins.

For Joseph, whose first stint as a casting director was for Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake (2006), care reveals itself as a way of holding—holding stories, people and communities together through art. “[Ogale is] constantly holding people. And I think that, for me, is what care in culture is about. It’s about care being part of humanity,” she regarded. Ogale, in turn, reached inwards. His childhood in Ogalewadi etched empathy into a behaviour, not as something taught, but simply lived, a cultivated intuition. He often returns to his grandmother’s chiffon saris, to oral histories, to the fragments of family archives that shimmer with tenderness and bursts of colour, along with the chaos inherent to our nation.

I think culture has to be colloquial. It's not an elitist concept. It has to be very accessible, very relatable. – Gaurav Ogale

Joseph, recalling her formative years in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), described the Indian city as a gentle paradox, tremendously rebellious yet equally soft, permissive of freedom that is both strong and vulnerable. That sensibility informed her casting practice, where the overlooked child hiding beneath a classroom table was the one she actually wanted to interact with. “The greatest currency we have right now is attention and care,” she insisted later on in the chat, positioning listening as a radical act in an attention-starved world.

Time and again, the session circled back to archives of cities, cinema and fleeting human encounters. For the visual artist, Mumbai’s sea also becomes an archive, its vastness a recurring motif across his art. His glitchy animations and bricolage graphics stitch together myriad memories and textures: a kalipeeli taxi set against an 18th-century Afghan church, the name of a young cotton-candy seller remembered a decade later, the imperfect inflexion of an unadulterated voice note transforming into poetry. “We find beauty in our imperfections. It’s in the chaos of our bones,” he mused.

The greatest currency we have right now is attention and care… When you collaborate, you really learn to care for each other. – Tess Joseph

Both speakers lingered on vulnerability, a quality seldom accepted or even acknowledged in Indian families, yet necessary for art to be true. Joseph likened her Spoken Fest to an ‘annual empathy bootcamp’, a space where unedited voices could be heard without judgment. Together, they suggested that care is less a prescription than a practice: a tuning in, a willingness to illuminate “all the bits, not just the beautiful ones”.

Perhaps, the ethics of a discipline of care are disarmingly simple yet Sisyphean, almost religious: to listen (without preconceptions), to remember (without erasure), to hold (without judgement). Or, as Joseph concluded, “That’s really what care comes down to. It’s the humanity of who we are.” A culture of care, and culture as care. 

With ADFF:STIR Mumbai geared to return to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2026, we look back to key conversations from the ~log(ue) programme and highlights from the 2025 edition. Stay tuned for more throwbacks and exciting updates to be released in the coming weeks.