Worlding through the Caribbean: Audio Programme

Worlding Public Cultures presents two specially commissioned audio pieces as part of its London Gathering consent not to be a single being: Worlding through the Caribbean.

Body

For their new audio commissions, artist Ashley Holmes, and artist and writer Ayesha Hameed in conversation with poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan, consider the Caribbean’s deep cultural legacies of poetics and music. They journey through sound and spoken word, to explore the reverberations of personal, cultural and ancestral memory. The ocean and landscape as sites of violence are also demonstrated as a form of diasporic and queer possibility; building new subjectivities through language and sonic experiments – what Stuart Hall has described as survival strategies of Caribbean vernacular culture, ‘[...] the underground, subversive, rhythmic ‘rereading’ of an overground, dominant harmonics.’ (Hall, 2003).
 

Ashley Holmes, Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub), 2021 

Ashley Holmes has created a new sound piece that documents an exploration of liminality, Black geographies, and how musical traditions derived from the Caribbean have travelled. Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub) is an experimental composition that weaves together an accumulation of fleeting and momentary incidents in sound that have been manipulated, layered and sampled from various digital and analogue music recordings, performances, vocals and field recordings. The piece utilises various digital effects, delays and echoes to journey through and connect Britain and the Caribbean, making reference to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, an exploration of relational belonging as a decolonial poetic intervention. The audio piece is informed by Holmes’ interest in links between the ecologies, social contexts and nuances of Dub and music from Jamaica during the 1970s, to Grime and it’s continually mutating subgenres in Britain, in the early-mid 2000’s to present day. Pending, Still (Sync n Feeling Dub) examines the potential of music and DJing as a valuable research methodology, to think about cultural memory, generational cycles of re-visiting sound and ways that we define and understand our relation to history, nature, affect and space.

 

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Ashley Holmes is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Sheffield interested in the collection, dissemination and presentation of music and sound. Holmes’ work traces the nuances, legacies and unique authority of music from Jamaica and its political, social and cultural contexts. His practice encompasses audio-visual installations, collaborations, radio broadcasts, performances and ongoing research projects that make connections between public space, sonic fiction, memory and citizenship. He hosts Tough Matter, a monthly broadcast on NTS Radio, and also facilitates Open Deck – a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to music, sound and oral histories.

 

Ayesha Hameed: Radio Brown Atlantis with Shivanee Ramlochan

Radio Brown Atlantis is a project by artist and writer Ayesha Hameed. The project takes the shape of an experimental radio program that invites practitioners in the field of sonic art, music, and performative thought. This aims to explore the entanglements between Brown and Black bodies from the African diaspora, and South Asians displaced by indenture, connected through the experience of oceanic colonial routes. At the core of the project, the subaquatic zones of Brown Atlantis unfold as catalysts for racial potentialities that are constituted in the conjunction of the ontologies of earth, ocean and non-western subjectivities. The radio program engages in spontaneous conversations, shaped by music, literature, sonic art and storytelling.
 
In this episode of Brown Atlantis, Hameed and poet and essayist Shivanee Ramlochan discuss the capacity of poetry, to speak to the truth beneath the truth of long legacies of indenture and sexual violence. They also explore the dark channelling and sorcery through the act of bearing witness, the queerness of running through Caribbean fields of cane, and Shah Rukh Khan’s hair.
 
References

‘Witch Hindu’ by Shivanee Ramlochan: https://poets.org/poem/witch-hindu
'Chaiyya Chaiyya' from Dil Se: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKX5x3KZXfY&ab_channel=ShahadatAliThe 'Coolie Belles' of Caribbean postcards: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/indo-caribbean-women-colonial-postcards/index.html
‘The Abortionist's Daughter Declares Her Love’ by Shivanee Ramlochan: http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/30-november-2013/the-abortionists-daughter-declares-her-love/
'Scorpion Gyal' by Sundar Popo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCH9wSBLFw&ab_channel=CaribbeanVibez
‘Hanuman Chalisa’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AETFvQonfV8&ab_channel=T-SeriesBhaktiSagarExcerpt from ‘The Good Brown Girl’: https://www.wasafiri.org/article/the-good-brown-girl-by-shivanee-ramlochan/

Click here for Biographies

Ayesha Hameed explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media – their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement are recurrent in her work, and offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019), and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently Co-Programme Leader of the PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet and essayist. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 People's Choice T&T Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Shivanee was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize for Poetry. ‘The Red Thread Cycle’, from her debut collection, won second place in the Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry, and was on audiovisual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in 2019. She has received residencies from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Millay Arts, and Catapult Caribbean Arts Grant. She has served as a poetry reader and editorial judge for Commonwealth Writers, Honeysuckle Press, Moko Magazine, and others. Her second book, a nonfiction narrative on Indo-Caribbean women’s disobedience, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2022. Shivanee’s work can be found online at www.novelniche.net, www.shivaneeramlochan.com, @novelniche