SUPPORTED BY UCL INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES MUSIC FUTURES
& THE RODDICK FOUNDATION
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: FABIANA ASSIS FERNANDES (UEMS), RAFFAELLA FRYER-MOREIRA (UCL MAL),
SCOTT HILL & PATRICK WHITE (SLADE SCHOOL)
KEY COLLABORATORS: GUARANI & KAIOWÁ ELDERS, WILLIAM RUSSELL (MONOM SOUND),
BILL ROBIN FULLER, A GUY CALLED GERALD & GUILHERME RIBEIRO
ARCHIVAL FUTURES : BUILDING A COLLABORATIVE ARCHIVE
This project proposes to develop an immersive spatial audio composition in collaboration with Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil. Drawing on field sounds recorded over the last 18 months as part of the Guarani and Kaiowá Digital Archive Project, supported by the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, this project invites members of the Guarani and Kaiowá communities to develop a creative composition of their archival sounds in a 3D audio installation and live spatial audio performance. By inviting indigenous communities to take an active role in the creation, curation and presentation of their heritage, we seek to challenge the historical exclusion of communities from the narration of their histories and the imagination of their futures.
The project builds on a series of collaborative experiments developed by the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab in partnership with Guarani and Kaiowá Indigenous communities in Brazil & The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS) which explore innovative approaches to archival practice. Following the initial EMKP documentation project Oga Pysy: Documenting Guarani and Kaiowá Ceremonial Houses in Mato Grosso do Sul, we developed a series of follow-on projects to explore the creative, collaborative, and sensorial affordances made possible by different digital media. These included Making Violence Visible, supported by UCL Global Engagement, The Guarani and Kaiowá VR Museum, supported by UCL Grand Challenges and the UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, and Ecologies of Thought, supported by UCL Global Engagement. Together, these projects assemble a Guarani and Kaiowá Digital Archive which aims to push the boundaries of heritage practice in both multimedia form and collaborative method, with almost all recordings made by community members themselves.
EXPERIMENTING WITH COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF PRESENTATION
The active participation of community members in the process of documenting and assembling the Guarani and Kaiowá archive played such a key role in shaping the content we recorded, that we began to explore ways of extending this community participation beyond the documentation stage to the process of presenting the archive itself. Through a series of different experiments we asked : How can we rethink the ways in which historical knowledge is produced, preserved and presented to different audiences? We explored these questions together with the Guarani and Kaiowá community, in an effort to open archival practice to other forms of history-making and other cultural traditions of transmitting knowledge between generations. In particular, these questions guided the The Guarani and Kaiowá VR Museum project and Ecologies of Thought, and led us to engage in a series of improvised Jam Sessions with members of the community.
RETHINKING THE SOUND ARCHIVE | EXPERIMENTS AT MONOM SOUND
This year we are building on our collaborative work and will be developing these sound experiments further in partnership with MONOM Sound in Berlin. Thanks to support from the IAS Music Futures team and the Roddick Foundation, two Guarani and Kaiowá representatives are joining us in Europe for a one week residency at MONOM, where we will work together to explore how their 4DSOUND technology and 58 speaker spatial audio array can be mobilised by the Guarani and Kaiowá community to preserve their sonic heritage, while also conducting a series of experiments to explore how Guarani and Kaiowá shamans - who use sound as their primary shamanic tool - envision the creative and metaphysical capabilities their studio makes possible. The residency will take place from Monday 17th July until Friday 21st of July, and will culminate in a private view of the initial work that results from the residency for invited guests. During the residency, we will be sharing our progress and broadcasting a live stream for the last hour of each day, and we will open our experiments to our global online audience. See the programme below for a complete timetable and links to access the transmission. Finally, we will present a summary of our project and a selected showcase of the work produced at UCL in a seminar and pop-up exhibition on Friday the 28th of July.
NEXT STEPS: DEVELOPING A LARGE SCALE EXHIBITION IN 2024
We are preparing a major exhibition in 2024 to showcase the extensive body of work that we have developed in partnership with Guarani and Kaiowá communities since 2020. We are making plans to assemble a full scale Guarani and Kaiowá ceremonial house - or Oga Pysy - in the UK, equipped with a full-size 4DSOUND system from MONOM, and we look forward to inviting our collaborating team of Guarani and Kaiowá elders to visit the UK. We are excited to begin these preparations, and look forward to sharing the rich work we have developed and reflecting further on the unexpected findings that have emerged. We are interested in hearing from organisations and institutions who may be able to support us, and we look forward to discussing potential partnerships with interested organisations. We are also grateful for support from individuals who would like to help us achieve this final stage of our project, and contribute towards the realisation of a major exhibition which preserves Guarani and Kaiowá ancestral culture, making visible the challenges faced by indigenous communities in Brazil, while also offering global audiences an immersive encounter with a profoundly unique way of understanding ecology, technology and what it means to be human.
MBA'EKUAA
GUARANI & KAIOWÁ
ARCHIVAL FUTURES
