Installation, poetry, and performance titled ‘Second to Swan Song’

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

A shift has been registered, a shift has been traced is a situated, multimedia immersive project and performance using radio, textile and text as a base to explore and interpret ideas of ephemeral fossilisation, archiving, and chaotic interactivity at cosmic scales. An analog foxhole radio set up (based on Shortwave Collective’s open wave receiver)  extends to create a radio field in the form of long suspended antennas of copper enmeshed in fibrous jute ropes, that when walked through generate perceivable interference, as an act of shifts being registered by colliding bodies of particles (including radio wave, sonic and human scales). 

The radio reception is impacted by the installation structure (site adaptive), spatiality (including material aspects of a space), weather, local atmospheric factors including radio waves enveloping a town/city, objects present in the installation set up (including the textile), time spent within the radio field, humidity, and miscellaneous electromagnetic activities and connections, amongst other. The textile is suspended amongst the wires, with manipulated weave that gives the surface a third dimension. The fabric is an archive, gradually changing yet maintaining the register of the ephemerality of time, of weathering, of what is was before it starts losing its shape again. The fabric represents crystallisation of change not only by the dint of its cultural relevance, but by acting as a trace fossil retaining the essence of the folds that lose their strength over time.  

The ubiquity of radio waves, bodily frequencies colliding at the smallest to the most perceivable arrangement of matter, the inherent fragility that is recorded in each sensitive interaction leaving an ever-lasting impact come together in the situated performance titled Second to Swan Song. The performance enlivens and extends impulses of the installation, staging the order in chaos of existence, through constant reconfiguration, acts of bonding, synchronising, repelling, repairing, growing, reflecting and yet, retaining each elemental essence. 

PERFORMANCE: Second to Swan Song 

Duration: 25 minutes approx. 

Notes: Site, sound and energy responsive performance

LYRICAL ENDING: 

I hear you in radio silence 

In mud you left your trace 

And the Mud holds your essence and it said to me to smear 

in smearing myself the mud smeared me with you

In my own little world I saw the universe 

Across all bends, I ran across all bends – and there was no end -but there was a centre. 

There is a centre and there like you – and I – 

The beginning of us dances ‘ on the edge – of light- 

In the twilight 

forever 

And it knows- 

It stores- 

It retrieves- 

And it stays- 

And I -will keep- spinning 

Because they stay 

Because they stayed. 

Rust/Time has been building up in me  

and so have you 

Weathering me 

Did the Ocean show me a night sky with exit wounds? 

Because all of them pass me through you. 

CREDITS: 

Concept and Creative direction: Aditi Chauhan 

Performers: Aditi Chauhan, Salma Elkafrawy, Ygor Anario, Youngji Cho 

Costumer Designer: Stephanie da Silva Faria 

Performance Videography: Alethia Pinzón-Rodríguez, Ranadeep Bhowmick 

Project Documentation: Aditi Chauhan