“All sorts of things can happen!”

The Bengal Creative Fest, a unique career fair for creative professionals of the country, is set to take off from April 23-24 at the Krisihibid Institute Auditorium, also marking the big launch of Bengal C Hub, the new platform of Bengal Foundation for creative professions. Prior to the event, managing director of Bengal C Hub Eeshita Azad spoke to The Daily Star about the idea behind the initiative, and what to be expected.

“Bengal Foundation has always invested in creative people, from its initiatives in music, arts and film. In a sense, this is our way of doing something for young people – aged 18-35 – who are working and looking to work in the creative industry.”

“We have created an online platform where a creative person can have their profile and their work samples up, and can network with other creative professionals in their own fields and other. One of the best things about this bilingual platform is that we can reach those outside Dhaka. The creative people outside Dhaka have remained an untapped resource, and it will benefit both the clients and creative people. Maybe if a girl in Khulna is a self-taught graphic designer, she can get noticed, or she can network with other creative professionals and start their own venture. All sorts of things can happen. Creative collaborations have been happening for centuries, but there has been no platform for Bangladeshis online like this.”

“We already have a lot of interest from institutional partnerships from universities and cultural institutions, to have a sharing of resources and exchange. The first thing to do is to populate the platform, and then we will set an intellectual baseline. We recently had a consultation discussion with 35 experts of various creative fields, and we will form a creative experts’ guild with them to facilitate quality control. The target is to have an online directory of creative professionals in one place. From there, we have a lot of plans.”

About the festival, Eeshita says: “Since we are starting a platform for creative professionals, instead of a soft launch of the web site we wanted to start with a career fest. What we want is for a young person to enter and get a flavor of all the places which have space for creative people. We will have creative organizations, corporate houses, university clubs, and a Digilab where they can sign up for the platform. We also have a number of interesting sessions on both days.”