Text, sound and projections at the AIIS Archive & Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, Gurgaon as part of the Museums and Archives Fellowship of the India Foundation for the Arts, 2016-2017

 

For a year I listened to music and recordings from ARCE's 'Diaspora' collections, specifically the collections of Indian music from Trinidad and Mauritius, recorded by Helen Myers, Laxmi G Tiwari and Prittiviraj Jayaram in the 1970s and 1990s. The archive presented itself to me in fragments, sound worlds around movement, migration, territory and homelands. This was music that had travelled, become significant within cultural and religious systems, and has been reproduced constantly among a mix of identities, existences, roots, ethnicities, histories of slavery, and songs. Listening and being in an archive that is concerned significantly with preservation, opened up questions around what it meant for creative practice to respond within it, and to archival material, within its limits and excesses. Also for archival material, to be generative and transformative and to be open perhaps, to the fictions that accompany an encounter with it. To listen to these recordings was to stay with the sound of the loss of place, identity and memory, and the re-construction in newness, of the same.

 

The fellowship culminated in two events:

I Have Spent This Life Foolishly: A listening session at Khoj Studios on Saturday, April 15th 2017, 6pm

Seevbalak’s Echochamber: Sound, Text & Projections at AIIS Archive & Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, April 24th – 28th, 2017

 

This project received support from India Foundation for the Arts under the Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative, with support from Tata Trusts.

 

Exhibition design: Sudeep Chaudhuri and Priya Sen