Noise of the Past
Lead Research Organisation:
Goldsmiths University of London
Department Name: Sociology
Abstract
Representing a disruptive noise to the performative enactment of the nation in stone, sound and ritual, it is now widely recognised that some stories and bodies have been drummed out of war and remembrance. This project seeks, through co-production, to explore how the noise of the past can be put into play in a series of interactions that make it possible to remember and converse beyond nationalistic and militaristic consensus. The research direction sets in play a cultural production which will be co-ordinated as a dynamic exchange between the researchers, artists and postcolonial generations on war and national memory, through the dialogic mode of call-and-response. Methodologically activating a multicultural encounter, 'Noise of the Past' will publicly converse through multi-sensory modalities / of poetry, historical documents, music and visual art. This collaboration will unleash tension and incommensurability to produce new configurations of open-ended belongings to the nation. The project will be one of actual co-production and public intervention through an audio and visual installation launched in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral. At the centre of this project is a highly professional visual soundscape with the award winning and internationally renowned musician Nitin Sawhney. In an exploration of how to imaginatively engage with everyday life, as aural and visual participants, the installation will move between the dissonance of 'noise' to the imagined purity of the nation. It will operate with discrepant and yet intertwined chords of sound, visual texture and stone to prompt how encounters can be brought into a tactile play of the past in the present.
The project develops a collaborative methodology between academic researchers and cultural workers in four stages. Firstly, researchers locate and make available to the artists, during the course of a workshop, sounds, military documents, maps, photographs and letters from a number of archives, including the Sound Archive at the Imperial War Museum and the India Office Library. The second stage will be the production of a poetic exchange in Urdu between a poet/visual artist (a grandson) with his grandfather (who is also a poet and WW2 soldier). The researchers are integral to generating the contextual space in which the exchange will take place. The artist asks his grandfather - whose brother died on the battlefield in the Middle East) and who himself fought in WW2 in the Indian Army under British Imperial rule in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and then moved to Coventry in the 1950s to work in the car industry - why he can't imagine his face in war ceremonies that mark the national calendar, and not even in those fleeting instances when a special monument has been unveiled for soldiers from the ex-colonies. In the third stage of the process, Sawhney in dialogue with the researchers, will explore and affectively respond to the traumas, silences and shared feelings of loss and displacement evoked in the poetic dialogue by creating new music. Then, in the final stage, the researchers engage the poet/visual artist to respond to the music in the form of a film. A highly experienced producer will oversee the technical aspects of the production, right up to the final installation. The cultural exchanges will be logged and documented by the researchers through the use of diaries, video and audio interviews. Furthermore, a sample of the audience will be interviewed after experiencing the installation.
The installation will be launched in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral during the season of Remembrance in 2007 / which is itself a consecrated site to both the trauma and memory of WW2. A conference will be held during the installation on the process of co-production, which will include practitioners, artists and academics.
Both the central production and the methodologicalprocess will be widely disseminated.
The project develops a collaborative methodology between academic researchers and cultural workers in four stages. Firstly, researchers locate and make available to the artists, during the course of a workshop, sounds, military documents, maps, photographs and letters from a number of archives, including the Sound Archive at the Imperial War Museum and the India Office Library. The second stage will be the production of a poetic exchange in Urdu between a poet/visual artist (a grandson) with his grandfather (who is also a poet and WW2 soldier). The researchers are integral to generating the contextual space in which the exchange will take place. The artist asks his grandfather - whose brother died on the battlefield in the Middle East) and who himself fought in WW2 in the Indian Army under British Imperial rule in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and then moved to Coventry in the 1950s to work in the car industry - why he can't imagine his face in war ceremonies that mark the national calendar, and not even in those fleeting instances when a special monument has been unveiled for soldiers from the ex-colonies. In the third stage of the process, Sawhney in dialogue with the researchers, will explore and affectively respond to the traumas, silences and shared feelings of loss and displacement evoked in the poetic dialogue by creating new music. Then, in the final stage, the researchers engage the poet/visual artist to respond to the music in the form of a film. A highly experienced producer will oversee the technical aspects of the production, right up to the final installation. The cultural exchanges will be logged and documented by the researchers through the use of diaries, video and audio interviews. Furthermore, a sample of the audience will be interviewed after experiencing the installation.
The installation will be launched in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral during the season of Remembrance in 2007 / which is itself a consecrated site to both the trauma and memory of WW2. A conference will be held during the installation on the process of co-production, which will include practitioners, artists and academics.
Both the central production and the methodologicalprocess will be widely disseminated.
