Slowing Down: dislocate, listen and connect

Residency and Workshop

Led by Ximena Alarcon

At the Srishti Interim, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology

2015

 

Ximena Alarcón was awarded a place on the Srishti Interim artistic residency at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India, from Nov 23rd to Dec 19th, 2015. Ximena had the pleasure to work collaborative with BA Creative Design students and with Aileen Bailey, a member of Srishti Faculty. They all engaged in the workshop Slowing Down: dislocate, listen and connect.
 
 
Slowing Down, was a workshop for creative collaborative process that invited fourteen students from Srishti to reflect on connections to the self, to the others and to the environment, and engage them in Deep Listening practice and collaborative creation of dislocated and improvisatory telematic sonic performances in Bangalore. Through slowing down, students questioned how the sounds of the city respond to their listening experience, how their voice and words resonated within the urban space, how dislocation sounds in Bangalore and how creatively, using telematic technologies, they could invite audiences to slow down, dislocate,listen and connect.
 
Dislocation was understood as a creative force to stimulate new narratives and statements of being and place.
 
After three weeks of a creative process, students created the improvisatory telematic sonic performance “Bangalore: Aural Transitions”.  The performance was composed by four short performances which were linked in a specific order to respond to the question:
“As the city of Bangalore transforms from the garden city to the silicon valley, it is interesting to ask ourselves at what cost are we developing and in what ways could this development benefit? What have we lost in this transition of the city and what have we found?”

 - The Journey of Life (Dev Valladares, Nijhal S. Majithia, Nynha da Cunha, Pearl D’souza) A narrative that finds correlations between a journey in a train & metro and the journey of our lives, from start to end, from birth to death.

 - Augmented Reality (Biswajit Abhijit Guha, Ines Barros, Saumya Grover) A performance that lets the audience experience Lavelle Road in its entirety: honks, screech, pub music and all. Let us see this place together.

 - Hectik (Aayush Wykes, Jayesh Joshi, Nishita Mudaliar, Mohammed Chiba) A performance that captures the evolution of Yelahanka by comparing and mixing the sounds that are organic and inorganic through yuxtaposition.

 - Harmonic Bangalore (Aparna Hedge, Karina Shantilal, Shubhika Malara) The objective is to look at this undeniable dichotomy: of the con-existence of city’s green and grey areas and then to present it through a sonic experience.

The locations used were: a ‘private’ sound controlled space (sound studio) at N5 (the new Srishti Campus), and a classroom where the audience was invited, in the Old Campus. Students used Jacktrip software for the bi-directional audio streaming connection.  In the first space they used an omnidirectional microphone (H4N) and headphones to listen; in the second space we used one cardioid microphone and four loudspeakers. The audience included Srishti students and staff members.

 

The performance was documented in video and sound by students and by the Srishti Interim documenting team. Srishti-Interim is built into the curriculum to encourage talent through an open-ended framework for learning by engaging with contemporary artistic practices. Contemporary artists from all over the world are invited to participate in the Interim.

 

For more information, images and sound, visit wwww.listeningperformingtransforming.wordpress.com

For more information about Srisht, visit www.srishti.ac.in

 

Illustration by Shubika Malara