Art Adda 2025 transforms Delhi’s urban heart with powerful storytelling, dance, film, and art to spotlight biodiversity, climate crisis, and civic imagination.
In an age of information overload and digital dissonance, it is rare to find an event that stirs the soul, touches the mind, and moves the body all at once. But that’s exactly what Art Adda achieved this week at the India Habitat Centre, as it lit up the heart of Delhi with a vibrant confluence of storytelling, ecology, and emotion.
Held under the larger umbrella of Urban Adda 2025 and curated by the Raahgiri Foundation in partnership with Indigo Creative, ‘Art Adda: Storytelling in the Heart of the City’ is not just another cultural event—it is a clarion call for empathy, environmentalism, and artistic intervention in urban spaces.
From the moment the lights dimmed to the final bow, the evening offered a multisensory journey—a rich tapestry woven with independent films, kinetic dance, panel dialogues, and immersive art installations, all focused on one powerful theme: biodiversity in an urbanizing world. “Art Adda was conceived to bring an essential dimension to our conversations about urban futures,” said Sarika Panda Bhatt, the Co-founder and Managing Trustee of Raahgiri Foundation, well known for sustainable mobility and tactical urbanism in India. “We at Raahgiri Foundation believe that art, in all its forms—film, performance, or visual installations— has an incredible power to touch hearts, provoke thought, and inspire collective action.
The Urban Adda Film Festival and the creative energies showcased tonight have vividly demonstrated how storytelling and artistic expression can help us co-create more sustainable, resilient, and soulful cities.” Indeed, the curatorial ambition was clear from the get-go. The film festival component, aptly programmed and thematically sharp, centered on hyperlocal ecological stories and global environmental challenges, especially from a youth-led lens.
The energy was electric as students, artists, journalists, urban planners, and curious citizens came together to witness a cinematic celebration of Earth’s endangered beauty. ‘Nets of Despair,’ an unflinching look at marine entrapment and fishing waste, bagged the Best Student & Amateur Film Award, while ‘Microplastic Mayhem,’ a searing exploration of the microplastic menace in Indian waterways, took home the Best Professional Film Award—an important validation for young storytellers tackling serious planetary themes. “We need more platforms like this—events and films that spotlight hyperlocal stories for global audiences,” said Jitendra Mishra, internationally celebrated filmmaker and recently elected President of CIFEJ, one of the oldest media organizations under UNESCO’s banner.
“What truly matters is setting the right context and forging emotional connections. And tonight, Art Adda did just that. It told us stories we don’t usually hear, and more importantly, it made us care.” Mishra was part of the event’s pulsating nerve center—the panel discussion titled ‘Storytelling is Civic Work’—moderated by filmmaker and entrepreneur Chandramouli Basu. The session felt less like a panel and more like a brainstorming chamber of conscience.
The lineup of speakers included Radhika Raj, Vijay Dhasmana, and Mallika Menon. The message is unambiguous: storytelling is not a luxury, it’s civic labor. It’s how we metabolize crisis and inspire change. “Telling stories of biodiversity is not just about beauty or tragedy. It’s about making visible what is usually ignored,” said Radhika Raj. “And once we see, we cannot unsee.” Vijay Dhasmana, known for transforming barren mining zones into thriving forests, emphasized, “A good story has the power to bring a forest back to life— not just in reality, but in the public imagination. And that’s the first step to transformation.”
Adding a visceral and visual punctuation to the evening, Stance Dance Studio delivered a breathtaking contemporary dance performance that translated themes of identity, displacement, and environmental grief into physical form. Their movement was fierce, meditative, and haunting— a choreography that spoke volumes even in silence.
Parallelly, the Habitat Central Atrium hosted a visually arresting art exhibition by Sagar Singh, whose interdisciplinary works moved fluidly between illustration, installation, and multimedia. From fragile paper dioramas of urban wildlife to bold immersive installations highlighting Delhi’s vanishing green cover, Singh’s curation was both poetic and political.
The exhibit, open till June 5, continued to draw crowds even after the main event closed. But what truly makes Art Adda a rare cultural achievement is the confluence of institutional will and community imagination. Beyond Indigo Creative’s deft production or Raahgiri Foundation’s mission-driven clarity, there is a collective pulse—an acknowledgment that storytelling is not a soft skill but a civic technology. “Art Adda is more than an event—it’s a space,” said Chandramouli Basu. “A space for creators and citizens to gather, reflect, and imagine better cities and better stories.”
In many ways, Art Adda represents the natural next step for Raahgiri Foundation, which since 2013 has redefined what urban engagement looks like in India—first through car-free Sundays and now through cultural festivals. Under the leadership of Sarika Panda Bhatt, whose legacy includes co-founding Raahgiri Day, spearheading Haryana’s Vision Zero, and co-producing The Silent Epidemic (a documentary on road crashes), the Foundation is now claiming its space in India’s cultural ecology.
In an increasingly fragmented world, Art Adda reminds us that the city is not just built with concrete but with compassion, not just zoned with masterplans but with memory and meaning. And if this is an indication, then the future of Delhi—and cities like it— may just be shaped not by those who build the tallest towers, but by those who tell the most urgent stories.