Zed.tells is a creative and collaborative endeavour to strengthen and expand the existing knowledge heritage of Kinnaur, intimately intertwined with lands, rivers, oral traditions, spiritual practices, and artistic expressions. It is a growing space anchored in critical thinking and driven by action/activism to enable a better tomorrow.
About
Zedtells is a community media platform based in Kinnaur. We are working with three major objectives:
To build a digital library of indigenous knowledge including (but not limited to) Himalayan flora and fauna, oral traditions, languages, art and architecture.
To build an interactive space for dialogue, discussions and artistic collaborations that strive to reinvent and reinvigorate the age-old traditions of storytelling and other creative forms of expression already present within the communities across the Himalayas.
Building and strengthening practices rooted in critical views, and forwarding diverse voices and ways of Living. We are a growing circle of community elders, farmers, scientists, artists, wildlife photographers, storytellers, animal whisperers, researchers, learning enthusiasts and more. And we seek to activate conversations and reflections across platforms, practices and disciplines to build lasting friendships and solidarities.
The prevalent socio-economic and environmental challenges, along with the threat of cultural assimilation and/or erasure looms over Kinnaur and other Himalayan communities. Ours is an effort to explore the stories and philosophies deeply connecting cultural, historical and ecological threads of the region. Celebrating the ways of our ancestors, where stories are interwoven with the land and the wildlife, and melodies are tuned to the rhythm of nature. At the same time, we believe it is equally important to question and address the internal fractures and injustices within our own societies. At Zedtells we are deeply conscious of the legacies we leave behind for our future generations.
Our archives feature songs and folklore that our Api-tetey (grandparents) learned from theirs. We have been documenting them with the aid of our community elders, the last generation with extensive knowledge of the field. Many of these stories are on the verge of getting lost or already erased from people’s collective imaginations. With the aid of the community, we have also retrieved and archived traditional songs from old cassettes made in the 80s.
Meet the Team
