Interdisciplinary Project Incubation
Larger Project Aims
I would like to investigate how communities engage with cultural heritage through sound, and how through the preservation of ‘sonic moments’ we might move toward the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. This approach pays homage to the ancient traditions of oral histories and historiographies that shape the south Asian subcontinent, particularly the island of Sri Lanka. By engaging with post-colonial theory and decolonial epistemologies of history and cultural sense-making, the aims of my project are threefold:
- Documenting: I would like to conduct a sonic ethnography of natural spaces and everyday cultural practices in Sri Lanka, to better understand the relationship between sound and being. Previous research by Jim Sykes connects sonic engagement with religious sociocultural practices; however, few of these soundscapes have been recorded and archived. To this end, I would like to practice field recording and interview research to better understand the sonic practices that underscore everyday engagement with culture.
- Sense-making: Working with existing archives and field recordings, I would like to design a sonic artwork that allows listeners to engage with Sri Lankan cultural heritage in an interactive/embodied way. I am not sure what this work will be yet – but I would like to translate the research into a more accessible engaging format and create a space for community reflection and fellowship.
- Research output: I would like to contribute to the small (but growing) conversation on artistic engagement in cultural and heritage spaces. I hope that this work can be featured in interesting spaces such as the museum of modern and contemporary art in Sri Lanka, which has not had any sonic works featured so far. Focused on the idea of communal listening, community engagement and community activation I am interested in how this type of work translates to more traditional forms of research outputs through a written ethnography.
Through the documentation and development of a ‘Sri Lanka’ centred sound archive, I would like to explore the impact of ‘sound-intervention’ on the preservation of cultural heritage. Drawing from acoustic ecology, soundscape studies, cultural preservation, and decolonial theory, I hope to honour a rich history of oral and aural South Asian histories to create a contemporary site of cultural engagement through sound. This type of cultural archive will be unique in the island and will preserve and encourage artists to use the rich sonic heritage that Sri Lanka has to offer.
Mind Map
Creative Practice
“The migrant bears her land on her back, in her pottu, in her language, and importantly in her dispossession of land. In this process of traveling across nations, literally invisible as an illegal, and yet as the postcolonial subversion of the colonial, she redraws the contours of her own body, action, and discourse. It is her praxis.”
Sumathy Sivamohan (2005)
The Almariya or the wooden cupboard has always been a humble vessel containing the most precious valuables of a Sri Lankan woman. An unassuming fixture in Sri Lankan homes, these cupboards are often handed down from generation to generation, and yet in times of migration it is often left behind, left to carry the quiet voice of history and family.
Borrowed from the portugese word Armário, the அலமாரி (Almari) in Tamil or අල්මාරිය (Almariya)in Sinhalese is a symbol of how the colonial exists within the supposed post-colonial, carried in language, culture, stories and bodies. The Almari holds the invisible struggle that Sri Lankan Tamil women carried with them as they migrated across continents, dispossessed of their homeland. It carries the imprint of Portugese colonisation or Ceilão português on the island in its languauge both in Tamil and Sinhala, as well as a history of migration and movement that exists within Sri Lankan Portugese creole tounge.
This work honours the political act of existing in a body that is always subjected to scrutiny, and in a tounge that carries over 400 years of colonial violence that the world has since forgotten. It interrogates the very gendered experience of migration, and asks a simple question: what does belonging sound and feel like, in a reality in which migrant women are invisible?
This work, contained within the Almaria, is a soundscape composition made from the Sri Lankan Portugese creole language archive (Cardoso & Costa, 2021), and features poetry from a volume titled Mariyatha Marmpathi written by Tamil women who write about displacement and displaced sensibility (Sumathy, 2005). In the composition, I juxtapose the voices and stories of disaporic women who have had to endure unimaginable tragedy and violence as they crossed unfamiliar territories in search of safety, with the archive of Sri Lankan portugese creole recorded in the very same places from which Tamil women have had to flee. This work connects two stories of migration almost 500 years apart, through language and sound.