C U R A T O R S ' N O T E
The second edition of SOUNDPHILES is themed around Time
Fabric. We bring together works that in myriad ways foreground the
relationship between sound and time. How does sound shape our experience of
time? And how does time shape our experience of listening? Sometimes, when time
is very slow, the ticking clock sounds louder than it is, sometimes, in the
frenzy of a moment, one sound remains and becomes a portal to enter that
‘once-upon-a-time’. And sometimes, time hangs so heavy that even silence is
sound. Sometimes sound is music, sometimes sound is signal, but always noise is
also sound.
The works in this edition explore time in diverse ways – as a
season in Pahadi
Pastoralists, as aging in Swimming Pool, as a
generational gap in Lonely Lives, as a fraught media environment
of the Emergency
Control Room, as tradition to be discarded in Saving
Disgrace, as field recordings of a rivulet sped up in Riverrun
2013, as a loss and a waiting in Number Unreachable,
and as an experience of listening in time through time in Levels.
SOUNDPHILES sets a limit on the duration of the works to under 7
minutes, and within that we attempt to create an experience of the multiple
ebbs and flows of uncounted time. Our aim as in the past is to produce a shared
listening environment, which speaks to an experience of cinema viewing as a
public act. To this shared public-ness, we bring together experiences of
intimacy, estrangement, and solidarity. SOUNDPHILES is an act of collective
listening in a darkened room, perhaps, also a process of captivity in linear
time. In narrative filmmaking time is linear, yet time is also still. Taking a
cue from Cinema, SOUNDPHILES experiments with viewing TIME but without the
cinematic image; will we experience the linearity of time, its stillness and
its simultaneity?
S a m i n a M i s h r a
I r a m G h u f r a n
