A Thousand Channels

Taking its title from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (“one way ashore, a thousand channels”), this four-part online radio programme features conversation, poetry, music, specially commissioned sound works and guest radio projects in the lead-up to Colomboscope 2021, and will also form part of the festival’s listening space in Colombo. The works, reports and compositions presented here coalesce around the festival theme ‘language is migrant’, encompassing various aural modes and listening practices across multiple Indian Ocean territories and beyond, sounding out their diasporic fringes and linguistic and musical enclaves.

​The pieces are best explored on a desktop computer.
 

Episode #1: A Thousand Channels


A Thousand Channels #1 © © Colomboscope A Thousand Channels #1 © Colomboscope
The first episode of this iteration of A Thousand Channels travels between South Asia and Australia with historian and dreamer Samia Khatun and composer Lee Ingleton; to Assam through the lyrical contestations of Miyah Poets; to Bangladesh through its Urdu-speaking communities ...

Continue reading and listen to episode #1.

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Episode #2: A Thousand Channels


A Thousand Channels #2 © © Colomboscope A Thousand Channels #2 © Colomboscope
The second episode of this iteration of A Thousand Channels listens critically to Indian-occupied Kashmir with anthropologist-poet Ather Zia, and ‘Azad’ Kashmiri migrants through the oral history archive project Tape Letters by Wajid Yaseen/Modus Arts; to poetic-historical-fantastical conceptions... Continue reading und listen to episode #2.

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Episode #3: A Thousand Channels


A Thousand Channels #3 © © Colomboscope A Thousand Channels #3 © Colomboscope
The third episode of this iteration of A Thousand Channels listens to Radio Ceylon’s resonance at times of war and nation-building with Isabel Huacuja Alonso; the multiversal adversities of the Indus river and Makran coast guided by Zahra Malkani; and the cosmologies of the South African free jazz scene via Siyabonga Mthembu... Continue reading und listen to episode #3.

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Episode #4: A Thousand Channels


A Thousand Channels #3 © © Colomboscope A Thousand Channels #3 © Colomboscope
The fourth and final episode of this iteration of A Thousand Channels documents some of the collective moments shared during Colomboscope: Language is Migrant: the Hearing Voices Café, documented through the voices of artist Dorá Garcia and a few of her many co-authors, and the live performances of trilingual performance platform  KACHA KACHA ... Continue reading und listen to episode #4.

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Production and Support


A project by Syma Tariq

Sound design: Francesca Savoldi

Collaborators: Natasha Ginwala, Anushka Rajendran


Supported by the European Houses of Culture grant and British Council Sri Lanka

​Syma Tariq's research is supported by TECHNE AHRC UK

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