Ancestral Tongues
3 March to 6 April 2024
About
經 ANCESTRAL TONGUES is a multiverse research project recovering ancestral vocal memory using collaborative methodologies in archiving, transmodal scoring and collective performance. Holding space for the reparation of our fractured relationship with Chinese languages (“dialects”) within the space of 136 GOETHE LAB, the project manifests as experiments culminating in a set of embodied scores for a citizen choir and building mutuality around disappearing aural lineages.
The erasure of these languages, catalysed by the Speak Mandarin Campaign launched in 1979, seems inevitable as Singapore continually positions itself towards the anglicised world. Yet, what memory is held in the tongues of living descendants? The word 經 holds the meanings of thread, chant, and experience/history. Attuning to emergent and inherited intonations and phonemes, 經 ANCESTRAL TONGUES will be an active site for processing and patching together our language histories and ancestral memory.
Public Events
3 MARCH – 6 APRIL
Ancestral Tongues discussion-gathering
3 March, Sunday, 4 to 6pm
What is your relationship to dialect? If you identify with a dialect(s), what does it mean to you? Join Su and Salty for an intimate gathering, where visitors are invited to share thoughts and anecdotes on ancestral vocal memory, language, erasure, and identity, as well as any interesting dialect phrases, then participate in choral exercises with audio recording. This gathering will contribute to the beginnings of 經 ANCESTRAL TONGUES, with the hope of building interest and mutuality around our shared dialect histories.
*You do not need to be able to speak or be fluent in dialects to attend.
Visit here to register. Kindly note that the event is fully booked. If you wish to attend, please write to Kristine.Ng@goethe.de
Dialect Karaoke Party
27 March, Wednesday, 7 to 9.30pm
The endurance of any language is related to its existence in accessible entertainment. Come for a night of communal fun singing only songs in Chinese languages other than Mandarin, aka dialects.
Level of fluency is inconsequential; stumbling is no matter. Light prior song research encouraged but optional; anything found online can be sung to.
Dress code (optional): Ah Ma / Ah Gong chic
Light snacks and beverages provided. The event will be lightly documented, but feel free to opt out.
Visit here to register.
Ancestral Tongues performance-sharing
6 April, Saturday, 7.30 to 9.30pm
How do the stitching together and stewing of disappearing language histories reimagine ancestral memory as a warm bowl of congee? Can a gathering of collective ritual be medicine for the fragmented diasporic imaginary? This communal and participatory performance is a punctuation mark in Su and Salty’s research and performance project Ancestral Tongues sited at 136 GOETHE LAB and in the cosmos of individual and collective ancestry. Working with experimental embodied scores birthed from research, a citizen choir will sing, make sounds, move, and hold silence around the loss of dialect, forgetting, ancestral objects, migration, and sea crossings.
Within a spatial landscape conveying themes of migration and loss, this channelling of ancestral tongues is a prayer for a renewed relationship with ancestry and dialect, a practice of sonic coalescence simmering in the density of collective evocation. Audience members are invited to navigate geographies of remembrance and loss, while participating in this building of mutuality around disappearing aural lineages. The performance will be followed by a short discussion.
Visit here to register.
The Artists
Salty Xi Jie Ng is an artist and educator co-creating semi-fictional paradigms for the real and imagined lives of humans within the poetics of the interdimensional intimate vernacular. Often playing with relational possibilities, her transdisciplinary practice proposes a collective re-imagining through humour, care, subversion, discomfort, institutional critique, a celebration of the eccentric, and a commitment to the deeply personal, in hopes of uncovering hidden selves and histories in kinship with the other-than-human. The work she has developed across cultures and contexts manifests as forms like performances, rituals, films, conversations, community-based collaborations, brief one-on-one encounters, co-created meals, and publications. Her practice is currently concerned with ancestry, eroticism, death, and ageing. She has an MFA in art and social practice from Portland State University.
Suhui Hee is a multidisciplinary artist, composer and electronic musician working with sound, movement, performance and experimental scoring. Her recent research interests are in auscultations, the relationship between decomposition and composition, inhumanisms and the body as ecosphere. Her music under the moniker Anise is an entropic, cinematic blend of harsh glitchy beats cutting through delicate, shimmering vocals, field recordings, and chamber music blending the grotesque and beautiful.
Project IG
@ancestraltongues
The space
136 GOETHE LAB is a new project space at the Goethe-Institut Singapore. Housed in the former library and reading room, the space is intended as a response to the need for physical spaces for the arts, and an ongoing conversation with the public and arts community in Singapore.
經 ANCESTRAL TONGUES is supported as part of the open call for 136 GOETHE LAB, which invited applicants to activate the space with a group proposal.