Cities And Memory

I love the rhythm of the exchange between the anthropologist and the Chidigo speaker in the first section of this recording, and at first I thought about building a percussion piece around it. But I chose this piece to work with because of my deep interest in languages, especially marginalised ones, so I decided to work with words in the tradition of the Pitt Rivers collection, which brings together objects related by theme or function rather than place or time. I chose some words in the recording that have resonance for me and asked four friends to record them in their native tongues: Hanna Komar in Belorussian, Krysia Osostowicz in Polish, Darius Paymai in Farsi and Krithika Varagur in Tamil. I used those words as a kind of embroidery on the rough cloth of the field recording, interrupting, counterpointing, enhancing. The 2,000-year-old Tamil poem, "What He Said," is read by Krithika and in A.K. Ramanujan's English translation by Hanna. Languages, too, can mingle "like red earth and pouring rain".Researche