A Slightly Curving Place 2020
Itihasa, the word means, ‘thus indeed it was’. Thus indeed was the sound of that time? No. It was not. The sound as it comes to us, the sound we reach peeling and stripping layers of time, is only an image of the sound as it was. Faded, Forgotten, Lost.
This idea ran through our heads as we worked on the three audio pieces for a multi-authored soundplay and video installation entitled ‘A Slightly Curving Place’, curated by Nida Ghouse for an exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, between 23 July and 20 September 2020. The exhibition, an online discourse programme and two related publications constitute a tribute to Umashankar Manthravadi, a Chenna-born journalist, poet, and pioneer of acoustic archaeology. Uma began working in archaeoacoustics—in which archaeological sites are mapped and measured according to their acoustic properties—in the 1990s. He developed his own ambisonic technology on a shoestring budget to map ancient sites, such as the second-century theatre in Rani Gumpha, Odisha, and for over three decades was based at Delhi’s Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology. It is here that we first met Uma in 2009. Over the years, as our work has grown and branched in different directions, we have returned to ARCE many times for advice and support with resources. It was therefore of personal interest for us to work on a project revolving around the creative work of Umashankar Mantharvadi.
As for working with Nida Ghouse, our association and friendship go back several years, since we contributed to an exhibition on the early years of sound recording in India, which she was co-curating with Nuria Querol in 2013. The connection did not end with our audio-video installation or an essay, but it has been growing into a deeper relationship of sharing over the years. For this project, besides working on the Travelling Archive pieces, Sukanta also recorded on location for Nida.
We contributed to this tribute programme, which was woven around the question of what it means to listen to the past, composing soundtracks, writing essays, sketches, scripts, notes for the vitrines and participating in the discourse programme.
Click here to watch the entire video
This video starts with one of our compositions, entitled Burrowing. Our two other compositions were entitled Digging and Towards a Meaning. We worked with archival recordings of Arnold Bake and Wilhelm Doegen, and our own recordings to create these pieces.
The other artists and scholars who were part of this collaborative project were Umashankar Manthravadi, Bani Abidi, Mojisola Adebayo, Vinit Agarwal, Sukhesh Arora, Anurima Banerji, Lilia Di Bella, Madhuri Chattopadyay, Padmini Chettur, Arunima Chowdhury, Emese Csornai, Padma Damodaran, Hugo Esquinca, Jenifer Evans, Eunice Fong, Tyler Friedman, Janardan Ghosh, Brooke Holmes, Alexander Keefe, Robert Millis, Farah Mulla, Rita Sonal Panjatan, Ayaz Pasha, TJ Rehmi, RENU, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Sara, Yashas Shetty, Maarten Visser and others.
Our friend, sonic journalist, musician and sound scholar Peter Cusack, who is based in Berlin now, sent some photos after visiting the exhibition.
Meanwhile, the entire discourse programme, Coming to Know, co-hosted by Nida Ghouse and Brooke Holmes (Princeton University), can be listened to here, while an anthology co-edited by Ghouse and Holmes is due to be published in late 2021. Our segment, ‘Tuning’, had archaeologist Uzma Rizvi steering the course of the conversation.
You can read reviews of the exhibition here: