December 23 2016 – Presentation and listening session at Studio 21, Kolkata

 

Listenings at a border

Presentation and listening session by Gilles Aubry, Robert Millis and Moushumi Bhowmik ( The Travelling Archive)

Location:  Studio 21 Kolkata

Following their collaborative research trip at the Indian-Bangladesh border in the Shella area in North-East India, the artists will present a selection of sound recordings and discuss the complexities of their sound based approach to the region. This includes the many voices, languages, songs and memories of culturally diverse populations, as well as acoustic traces of the many ideologies which have been successively imposed on them: colonialism, Christianity, Indian nationalism, Khasi cultural revivalism and neo-capitalist globalization.

Recordings will be presented and the audience is invited to give their reactions and thoughts. Listening, recording and archiving strategies will be discussed, as well as their possibilities and limitations.

Robert Millis is a sound artist and musician from the USA, a specialist in the era of early recording and 78rpm shellac records. http://robertmillis.net/

Gilles Aubry is a Swiss sound artist and researcher based in Berlin. His practice is based on an auditory approach of the real, informed by researches on cultural, material and historical aspects of sound production. www.earpolitics.net

The Travelling Archive is a field recordings-based project in ethnomusicological research in Bengal, including Bangladesh, parts of eastern India and also the Bengali diaspora in and around London, Moushumi Bhowmik, singer and writer and Sukanta Majumdar, sound recordist, have been running this project since 2003. www.thetravellingarchive.org

Project funded by Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council