Tikri is a photographic and community documentation project focused on preserving visual, cultural, and everyday histories connected to Tikri, India.
The project documents streets, homes, neighbourhoods, markets, places of worship, landscapes, objects, memories, and local stories through photographs and open digital archives. The aim is to create an accessible and long-term public record using lightweight, low-cost technologies and collaborative participation.
Tikri is designed as a simple and reproducible documentation model that can work even with modest technological resources. A smartphone, intermittent internet access, and collaborative participation can together support meaningful local archiving and storytelling.
The project also explores practical uses of open digital infrastructure, including static websites, Git-based publishing, public archives, and AI-assisted workflows for organising, describing, translating, and preserving material.
Tikri is informed in part by Triple Under Utilisation Theory, conceived by Sunil Abraham.
The theory examines how existing digital infrastructure, community knowledge, and human capability often remain underused despite being widely available. It encourages collaborative and low-cost uses of technology to support documentation, storytelling, education, local archiving, and public participation.
The project explores how accessible tools such as smartphones, open platforms, and AI systems can help communities document places, histories, architecture, everyday life, and cultural memory in durable and publicly accessible forms.
- Rafika Pravin — Project Lead
- Moina — Project Lead
- Sunil Abraham — Founding Director
The project website is published using GitHub Pages:
- Document Tikri through photographs and written records
- Preserve local memory and everyday histories
- Build an open and accessible public archive
- Encourage collaborative documentation practices
- Experiment with lightweight digital preservation workflows
- Explore AI-assisted archival and storytelling methods
- Photographs
- Streets and neighbourhoods
- Markets and everyday life
- Religious and cultural spaces
- Architecture and old houses
- Oral histories and memories
- Local stories and narratives
- Maps and location-based documentation
- Archival material and ephemera
The site is designed as a lightweight static website using GitHub Pages and Jekyll. The project prioritises simplicity, accessibility, long-term maintainability, and low-bandwidth usability.
Unless otherwise stated, original project material may be shared under an open license suitable for archival and educational reuse.