Since 2025, Moving Pictures has worked in collaboration with Kent Sri Swarna Dhurgai Amman Temple through an ongoing artistic residency. Grounded in the project's Site-Integrity methodology, the residency has involved collaborative filmmaking, workshops and public dialogue exploring the temple's evolving relationship to Ramsgate and its role within the town's cultural and social landscape. The project documented the 2026 Chariot and Water Festival, which enabled the temple's deities to process through Ramsgate town centre and to the seafront.
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Within Hindu traditions, festival processions enable the deities to leave the temple and enter the public realm, extending blessings and creating opportunities for wider communities to encounter and participate in ritual life. Accompanied by music, prayer and devotional offerings, the procession transformed familiar streets and public spaces into temporary sites of collective worship and celebration. As the first Hindu chariot procession ever to take place in Ramsgate, and one of the first events of its kind in the UK, the festival represented a significant moment of socio-spatial agency, extending ritual practices beyond the temple building.
Drawing on collaboratively produced films created with the congregation, the project will re-present the festival through a series of site-specific screenings and community reflection events across Ramsgate. Using artistic research as a catalyst for discussion, these events will bring together residents, community organisations, local authorities and heritage stakeholders to explore the significance of living heritage in contemporary public life. The screenings will provide a platform for collective reflection on questions of cultural visibility, belonging, social-spatial agency and the ways communities actively shape and transform the places they inhabit.
This work forms part of the wider research project, Moving Pictures: Reusing Cinemas as Places of Worship in the Diaspora, which examines the adaptive reuse of former cinemas by diaspora faith communities through architectural research, artistic practice and community collaboration. Further project material can be found at moving-pictures.info.
