How an afternoon of stories brought two generations together.
There are places in this world that are portals to different realms.
Part of an unconnected network that keeps alive the different meanings, directions and pursuits of human life. Even at the staggering number of over two million, all are unique. Old-timey and dusty, or posh and modern, it does not matter. They are, above all, places of wisdom, solitude and self-reflection. They are built by paper, from the endless labour of minds who chose to press their thoughts onto a page and trust it to outlast them.
They are libraries. Places that become community spaces. Where people come to read, to think, and to find each other.
It is in these libraries where the next generation of creators and thinkers is raised.
It felt right to us, when we visited Goa, that an evening celebrating paper and art should be held in one.
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
— Philip Pullman
A Place of Books and Pages
The Grand Duos of Goa was built in collaboration with Kooky Kuriosity, a Goa-based creative platform specialising in theme-based events. Together, we designed an evening that would bring grandparents and their grandchildren together through a shared love of art and paper.
The venue chose itself. Housed in a traditional Goan home, the Bookworm Library in Saligao has the quiet, unhurried quality that most spaces lose once they grow up. Its ethos, one of warmth and welcome, reflects a deep and abiding love for books, and the paper that makes them.
For an evening about intergenerational creation, there could not have been a more fitting backdrop.
…when a grandchild reads a book, they are receiving it from someone who may have lived centuries ago, who pressed their thoughts onto paper and trusted it to travel. Paper, in this way, is a medium for time travel.
Crease the Day
On the 10th of August 2024, eight to ten pairs of grandparents and grandchildren arrived at The Bookworm Library at 4pm. What followed over the next two hours was a genuinely lovely sequence of events.
Professional art facilitators guided participants through paper craft. All were lost in folding, shaping, and creating together. Origami filled the evening with the kind of quiet that only arrives when hands are busy making something, focused and occasionally punctuated by the soft sound of paper finding its form.
The showcase at the end brought everything together. Participants displayed what they had made, which was more than mere art and paper craft. All of it became the evidence of an evening well spent, of two generations finding, briefly, the same frequency.
Together, we designed an afternoon that would bring grandparents and their grandchildren together in their love for stories.
A Grand Creation
What struck us most about the Grand Duos of Goa was not the craft itself, but what the craft enabled. The origami, the folding, the making, paper gave two generations a shared language. It turned an evening in a library into a memory that both will carry.
Paper has always been this kind of quiet intermediary, tactile and unhurried, and perhaps the ideal medium for connection. It is, after all, the material that has kept libraries in business.
When a child picks up a book, they come in touch with something from someone who may have lived centuries ago, who pressed their thoughts onto paper and trusted it to preserve the information. Perhaps even to pass it down to future generations. Paper, in such instances, transforms from a medium for communication into one for time travel. The Bookworm Library, with its love for the written and the made, holds this understanding at its very core.
A Story Well-Paged
The evening was one of a kind. It showed us how art and paper transcend generations, how paper has always been the medium through which knowledge is passed down, beauty is made, and people of very different ages find common ground.
The Grand Duos of Goa encapsulated all of this in a single evening at a beautiful library in Saligao: two generations, a room full of paper and art, and everything remarkable that happened in between.
