Santiniketan don weaves a tapestry of words through sound game

42-year-old Ghosh, who has put up his installation work 'Incomplete Circles-Invisible Voices' at Kuchi-Muziris Biennale, stumbled upon the idea of developing an inter-language sound game for the art event.

"As many as 24 communities migrated to Kochi since the coming of the Arabs, the most recent being the Kashmiris. I was curious about their oral traditions and the possibility of a meeting point for different language practices," Associate Professor at the Department of Painting at Kala Bhavan, University of Visva-Bharati, Ghosh said.

"In a multi-cultural milieu, there is an inherent danger of languages of smaller communities losing their identity. I am trying to explore in a hypothetical manner the notion of self determination and element of loss in a multi-cultural situation. I thought of exploring it in a workshop-like situation where people can come and playfully interact," he said.

Ghosh, who has put up his sound installation behind Cochin Club in Fort Kochi area, has been doing this experiment in the north-east for the last three years where various communities live together. His inspiration comes from renowned artist Badal Sircar (1925-2011), an exponent of alternative theatre, known as Third Theatre.

Ghosh took inspiration from Sircar's workshops, involving organic participation and interaction through games and were designed for skill development. "I was seized of the idea of whether these games could be shared in inter-cultural and multi cultural situations in Kochi where different cultures and communities co-exist."

The workshops are based on words loaned from Malayalam, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch and Arabic. For the biennale, his work is based on Malayalam words. "Earlier too, I have been holding my workshops on loaned words. Here I have been doing it with the help of Lokdharmi theatre group."

"Take the word Kushini (cuisine) in Malayalam, Kitchen in English and Cuisine in French. These words are far removed from each other in texture and sound and are drawn from language sources of different cultures. Still there is an underlying aural connect between them," the artist-professor cited an example.