This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a M... more This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a Mellon-funded, inter-institutional research project titled: ‘Re-centring AfroAsia: Musical and human migrations in the pre-colonial period 700-1500 AD’ (University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, Ambedkar University Delhi). The production is titled Ife and Bilal and is an intercultural, interdisciplinary collaboration between artists from South Africa, India, and Turkey. It explores ancient oceanic connections through a live improvised creation using sound and visuals that echo the past with the present.
In the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago, water was the conduit that carried people, ideas, and sounds between Africa and Asia. The story of Ife and Bilal revisits that world, where journeys were unpredictable and at the mercy of the forces of nature. Knowledge, collaboration and improvisation were key to survival, and our process embraces these elements, moving away from the literal and towards themes from the littoral, using historically-informed media in experimental ways to convey a narrative.
Resisting nostalgic or stereotypical representations of a past, we draw inspiration from 10th Century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous enquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. The performed visuals explore the material aspects of water, sound, metal and light. Here, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history and star maps of fate and fortune. We aim to reflect on the experimental process of creating Ife and Bilal as artist-researchers, pushing at the boundaries of this broader decolonial epistemological endeavour.
British Forum for Ethnomusicology 2019 Annual Conference, 2019
This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a M... more This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a Mellon-funded, inter-institutional research project titled: ‘Re-centring AfroAsia: Musical and human migrations in the pre-colonial period 700-1500 AD’ (University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, Ambedkar University Delhi). The production is titled Ife and Bilal and is an intercultural, interdisciplinary collaboration between artists from South Africa, India, and Turkey. It explores ancient oceanic connections through a live improvised creation using sound and visuals that echo the past with the present. In the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago, water was the conduit that carried people, ideas, and sounds between Africa and Asia. The story of Ife and Bilal revisits that world, where journeys were unpredictable and at the mercy of the forces of nature. Knowledge, collaboration and improvisation were key to survival, and our process embraces these elements, moving away from the literal and towards themes from the littoral, using historically-informed media in experimental ways to convey a narrative. Resisting nostalgic or stereotypical representations of a past, we draw inspiration from 10th Century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous enquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. The performed visuals explore the material aspects of water, sound, metal and light. Here, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history and star maps of fate and fortune. We aim to reflect on the experimental process of creating Ife and Bilal as artist-researchers, pushing at the boundaries of this broader decolonial epistemological endeavour.
This dissertation restudies the history and selected archival musical recordings relating to the ... more This dissertation restudies the history and selected archival musical recordings relating to the Jews and Mappila Muslims on the Malabar coast of Kerala, India. These two communities arose out of transoceanic migrations and interactions over the longue durée, and in reconstructing their past, this work aims to uncover traces of their links to each other and to others across the seas. This is a part of a larger project, Re-Centring AfroAsia, which seeks to trace human and musical migrations between 700-1500CE. Previous studies, apart from suffering from colonial biases, have tended to focus on a single religion, a single community, or a single discipline, with the aesthetic fields remaining largely untapped as a source. This work combines diverse sources and methodologies – using a musical archive, restudies, field interviews, field recordings, as well as a range of secondary sources, and crosses over multiple fields of study. The field research threw up certain inadequacies in the e...
This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a M... more This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a Mellon-funded, inter-institutional research project titled: ‘Re-centring AfroAsia: Musical and human migrations in the pre-colonial period 700-1500 AD’ (University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, Ambedkar University Delhi). The production is titled Ife and Bilal and is an intercultural, interdisciplinary collaboration between artists from South Africa, India, and Turkey. It explores ancient oceanic connections through a live improvised creation using sound and visuals that echo the past with the present.
In the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago, water was the conduit that carried people, ideas, and sounds between Africa and Asia. The story of Ife and Bilal revisits that world, where journeys were unpredictable and at the mercy of the forces of nature. Knowledge, collaboration and improvisation were key to survival, and our process embraces these elements, moving away from the literal and towards themes from the littoral, using historically-informed media in experimental ways to convey a narrative.
Resisting nostalgic or stereotypical representations of a past, we draw inspiration from 10th Century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous enquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. The performed visuals explore the material aspects of water, sound, metal and light. Here, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history and star maps of fate and fortune. We aim to reflect on the experimental process of creating Ife and Bilal as artist-researchers, pushing at the boundaries of this broader decolonial epistemological endeavour.
British Forum for Ethnomusicology 2019 Annual Conference, 2019
This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a M... more This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a Mellon-funded, inter-institutional research project titled: ‘Re-centring AfroAsia: Musical and human migrations in the pre-colonial period 700-1500 AD’ (University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, Ambedkar University Delhi). The production is titled Ife and Bilal and is an intercultural, interdisciplinary collaboration between artists from South Africa, India, and Turkey. It explores ancient oceanic connections through a live improvised creation using sound and visuals that echo the past with the present. In the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago, water was the conduit that carried people, ideas, and sounds between Africa and Asia. The story of Ife and Bilal revisits that world, where journeys were unpredictable and at the mercy of the forces of nature. Knowledge, collaboration and improvisation were key to survival, and our process embraces these elements, moving away from the literal and towards themes from the littoral, using historically-informed media in experimental ways to convey a narrative. Resisting nostalgic or stereotypical representations of a past, we draw inspiration from 10th Century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous enquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. The performed visuals explore the material aspects of water, sound, metal and light. Here, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history and star maps of fate and fortune. We aim to reflect on the experimental process of creating Ife and Bilal as artist-researchers, pushing at the boundaries of this broader decolonial epistemological endeavour.
This dissertation restudies the history and selected archival musical recordings relating to the ... more This dissertation restudies the history and selected archival musical recordings relating to the Jews and Mappila Muslims on the Malabar coast of Kerala, India. These two communities arose out of transoceanic migrations and interactions over the longue durée, and in reconstructing their past, this work aims to uncover traces of their links to each other and to others across the seas. This is a part of a larger project, Re-Centring AfroAsia, which seeks to trace human and musical migrations between 700-1500CE. Previous studies, apart from suffering from colonial biases, have tended to focus on a single religion, a single community, or a single discipline, with the aesthetic fields remaining largely untapped as a source. This work combines diverse sources and methodologies – using a musical archive, restudies, field interviews, field recordings, as well as a range of secondary sources, and crosses over multiple fields of study. The field research threw up certain inadequacies in the e...
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In the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago, water was the conduit that carried people, ideas, and sounds between Africa and Asia. The story of Ife and Bilal revisits that world, where journeys were unpredictable and at the mercy of the forces of nature. Knowledge, collaboration and improvisation were key to survival, and our process embraces these elements, moving away from the literal and towards themes from the littoral, using historically-informed media in experimental ways to convey a narrative.
Resisting nostalgic or stereotypical representations of a past, we draw inspiration from 10th Century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous enquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. The performed visuals explore the material aspects of water, sound, metal and light. Here, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history and star maps of fate and fortune. We aim to reflect on the experimental process of creating Ife and Bilal as artist-researchers, pushing at the boundaries of this broader decolonial epistemological endeavour.
In the interconnected world of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago, water was the conduit that carried people, ideas, and sounds between Africa and Asia. The story of Ife and Bilal revisits that world, where journeys were unpredictable and at the mercy of the forces of nature. Knowledge, collaboration and improvisation were key to survival, and our process embraces these elements, moving away from the literal and towards themes from the littoral, using historically-informed media in experimental ways to convey a narrative.
Resisting nostalgic or stereotypical representations of a past, we draw inspiration from 10th Century Arabic, African and other contemporaneous enquiries into astronomy, astrology, optics, geometry and alchemy. The performed visuals explore the material aspects of water, sound, metal and light. Here, science and art work together with music to locate unseen currents of history and star maps of fate and fortune. We aim to reflect on the experimental process of creating Ife and Bilal as artist-researchers, pushing at the boundaries of this broader decolonial epistemological endeavour.