Contemporary sound to space formulations in poetics.
archaeological
specters
Lecture Transcripts (link)
Parsons School of Design, November 2024
Which eco-cultural stories get told?
Cultural Sonic Futures
I propose multifarious dioramas for the MET, to create an archeological agency for historical artifacts. These dioramas will allow contemporary stories to unfold rhizomatically, rooted in shared histories. Artifacts become metaphysical sites for introspection and transformation, revealing their collective associations, indigenous roots, and the essence of their origins. The dioramas embody sensorial experiences of the time and place where the eco-cultural origins of bodies and landscapes have been displaced.This project offers a speculative curatorial framework, blending historical objects with contemporary cultural recordings to generate new narratives, rituals, and forms of storytelling. It envisions the museum as a contemporary tool that enables imaginative transcultural exchanges, unearthing new meanings and fostering empathy for displaced histories. The proposed outcome is an exhibition design hosting dioramas at the MET, giving archeological agency to bodies and multicultural landscapes, while providing a unified sense of shared empathy in our histories, amplifying ancient cultural resonances in contemporary dialogues. By working with colonial archaeological artifacts in Western museums, it introduces porosity for marginalized voices and engages in critical reinterpretations and reignition of collective meaning making. Through radical rearticulations, it bridges past worlds to coexist and stretch forward into future eco-cultural identities, offering new spaces for commoning and uncommoning the future. By cultivating the art of learning to trust another worlds, in this world, of trusting in the possibility of an additive operation that enlarges what reality may become capable of encoding and transmitting. These frameworks aim to transform collective memory into active dialogues, nurturing a broader understanding of shared histories and possible futures.
I am interested in the idea of how immaterialities are expressed in different material forms through cultural progressions. How these cultural artifacts travel through time and colonial histories to different contexts and lose their essence in transition. My attempt through performative (rites and rituals) and visual interventions is to re enliven some of these essences through heuristic devices such as contemporary cultural dioramas (in digital, miniature craft based frames that accompany them in the museum space) to reveal their embodiment in the present time associations to a particular place and their potential to learn and unlearn from their past to build future narratives that are relevant to our contemporary practices, in an attempt of continuing dialogue. Their religious and emotional significance belonging to a certain place and community which limits new interpretations, ongoing progression and criticism due to the role it actively plays as identity building of groups of people. By disowning the flattened name tags in museums one can open up potentialities of widening imaginative landscapes in the western cultural institutions where they live and are witnessed today.
Some of the strategies I wish to experiment with to activate these proposed Diorama are through liminal sensorial spaces, sent based experiences of the time and place where this cultural body is transported from.
For these cultural experiences to be more emancipatory, I will be intervening in the linearity of these spatial dimensions, and manipulating their authentic venerated present lives and inserting the idea of a non place to their elemental present situation. Documenting the local perspectives and lived experiences of a particular sound, a particular scent, a particular movement, a particular space and displacing their spatial-temporal dimension so to make the experience of the artifact that would be looked through this embodied looking glass porous framework, in other words open to further dialogues and interpretations.
Non place
Non form
Non sound
Non temporal
Non spatial
Lost scent
Lost taste
Lost directionality
Healing haunted frameworks : (Re)manifesting essentialisms that transcend biases. Enenacting care practices by cultivating new futures by studying existing disparities in order to go towards an indivisible, equitable material future/culture.
A way of looking at the way we do things so that this way of looking becomes its doing. - Derrida
New rituals, surgical cultural interventions (methods on local geographies) to produce new bodies of knowledge, towards an indivisible cultural landscape where a radically new possibility of exchange can be embodied to foster dialogue around equitable (shared) material futures.
Micro-Ritualistic Environments for de-colonial experiences at THE MET on cultural artifacts.
eSSENTIAALISMS
ESSENTIAL DIAGRAMS OF VIBRANCY
In doing so, the project hopes to offer a speculative curatorial direction, engaging exchange of different imaginative perspectives, new narrative, new meaning and forms of storytelling. Produces new rituals of coexistence for the displaced artifacts. Giving archeological agency to bodies and multicultural landscapes, while providing a unified sense of shared empathy in our histories.
Magic Realism through Rituals :
Rishi Mandal Yantra (traditional examples of diagram based portals/worlds) expansion and contraction of space through poetics or visual hypnotic diagrams of impossible possibilities of the future
Case study : Miniature domesticities for the divine ; (doll house like) - a way to bring play, care and reenactment of faith in everyday life and representation of self and the society.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TIME & PRACTICES
Horticulture of time
Gestures in motion
Historical artifacts, particularly those acquired post-colonization and held by Western institutions, need to be unmeasured and ephemeralized. Since they carry with them the measured immeasurability of a cultural force. By re-manifesting these images through vernacular hypnotic diagramming of past cultural rites and rituals, we can open simultaneous worlds.
Acts of evoking the divine, such as creating decolonial dioramas, can resurrect displaced cultural artifacts through mythical diagrammatic vibrations, fostering devotion towards immaterial, non-human presences. The current project focuses on the Indian context, where idols undergo the process of Pran Pratishtha (“Pran” translates to “life”,” pratishtha” to “establish”) before being placed on the pedestal for worship in temples. Sthapana is the act of giving life to a non-being or material form, engaging the community in this process and establishing its being. Yantra (traditional examples of diagram based portals/worlds) would give us insights into local specificity into which they were born, consecrated, enlivened and maintained with acts of ritualistic devotional practices, providing a platform for sharing the divine reality of different cultures. This approach allows us to heal cultural heritages by exchanging perspectives on imagination, narrative, storytelling, form, function, and collective cultural exchange.
It is no longer a question of instituting a serial organization of the imaginary, but instead a symbolic and structural order of understanding. It is no longer a question of graduating resemblances, ultimately arriving at an identification between Man and Animal at the heart of a mystical participation. It is a question of ordering differences to arrive at a correspondence of relations. The animal is distributed according to differential relations or distinctive oppositions between species; the same goes for human beings, according to the groups considered. When analyzing the institution of the totem, we do not say that this group of people identifies with that animal species. We say that what group A is to group B, species A' is to species B'. This method is profoundly different from the preceding one: given two human groups, each with its totem animal, we must discover the way in which the two totems entertain relations analogous to those between the two groups— the Crow is to the Falcon...
CULTURAL SPECULATIVE CRITICISMS
INTERVENTIONS : YANTRA Rituals at the MET, miniature activation, artifacts, performances
Casts shadows : which eco-cultural stories get told in cultural institutions today?
Research into cultural memory as an artifact toward the design of the cultural institutes of the future. Cultural ecologies manifested in spatial diagrammatic motifs. Mapping sound narrative and iconographic/visual research of historical artifacts and manuscripts as they are practiced today.
“The encyclopedic knowledge stored in the myth-maker’s culture and language”.
“His point of departure is that language is primarily neither a tool for representing things nor a device to cope with the world by performative acts. Rather, it is an opening to the Other.”
Reinterpretation of cultural artifacts in western museums through multicultural storytelling.
Heritage conservation by stitching decolonial narratives that need to be re-archived, reoriented, rekindled. Museum hospitality to record and invite new ritualistic time based spatial embodiments. Contemporary forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Contemporary forms of timekeeping and cultural motifs morphed from fragile precarious states of ecological transformations, Tracing Evolutionary changing landscapes, new species - mapping past natural bodies from present and speculating future bodies and cultural resonances. New historical motifs of regenerative cultural ecologies to stand the test of time. New forms of future craft techniques, informed by decarbonized and non extractive time based embodiments in that historical border zone (donna)
If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident that the Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary or local stability (with the highest number of dimensions possible under the circumstances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becoming, but it also carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of multiplicities always farther down the line of flight. (Moby-Dick is the White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic Term of the Alliance;
creating an energetic, eventful forensic zone – a cascading stellar event or perhaps a mobile principle; or perhaps something circuit-like, tubular, intestinal, a broken ouroborous!
Cultural Design Tools
- Indigenous storytelling
- Cultural & Mythological narrative beings
- Ritualistic Spatial Practices
- Narrative Materialities
- Mythopoesis
- Identity-Graphs
- Allegorical Landscapes
- Designing Cosmologies
- Cultural Public Totems
- Cultural Massing in Museums
- De-colonizing Ecologies through Design Strategies
Cosmological StoryTelling Spatial Device : Designing a multicultural sonic façade / curation tool for museums by investigating indigenous mythological narratives, symbologies, and methodologies from past ontological worlds to transmit unity through contemporary design. This includes creating spatial identity graphs that trace eco-cultural vibrations from archaeological artifacts that are situated in western museums today. While exploring sonic and ritualistic time based spatial practices employing decolonizing strategies and narrative materialities. This approach enables multicultural storytelling, transforming museums into dynamic spaces where cultural objects play a vital role in activating eco-cultural porosity, fostering knowledge production, and promoting active engagement.
“It is intrinsically geared towards the Great Outdoors because it is shaped by dialogue, by conversation, by the need to say something to someone else.”
INTERVENTIONS
:
YANTRA Rituals at the MET, miniature activation
artifacts, performances
CULTURAL SPECULATIVE CRITICISMS
Placeness and placelessness of a place embodied in spacemaking