About OCO Symposium

At the intersection where embodied knowledge meets the contemporary, new landscapes of collective thinking emerge. The OCO Symposium is an annual programme dedicated to bringing together professionals from the fields of art, culture, and anthropology to discuss the evolving nature of the state's craft ecosystems. By convening a diverse range of intellectuals, the symposium focuses on urgent topics that help us dissolve the hierarchies and binary relationships between objects as cultural symbols and makers as living testimonies.

Every year, the symposium offers a unique curatorial prompt that shapes each panel, making each edition conceptually rich and scholarly rigorous. As the mission of Odisha Craft Odyssey is rooted in a long-term, multi-year craft documentation project through residencies, exhibitions, fellowship programmes, and publications, the OCO Symposium serves as a vital vertical. It creates a discursive space that moves beyond the region while anchoring parallel perspectives on research, artistic thinking, and institutional support across different domains.

Bringing together this diverse range of perspectives allows the symposium to become an active site of dialogue and discourse, while being a space for intellectual reciprocation that not only highlights the diverse lenses through which craft is viewed, but also generates a pedagogical environment that fosters critical and collective thinking as a key to understanding aesthetic and institutional divisions.