Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the historical and ethnographic research & thought processes behind the live audiovisual performance "Ife & Bilal: Songs on a Journey", centred in the globalised world of the Indian Ocean, 1000 years ago, re-examining histories and heritages linked by transoceanic connections.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a Mellon-funded, inter-institutional research project titled: ‘Re-centring Afro-Asia: Musical and human migrations in the pre-colonial period 700-1500 AD’ (University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, Ambedkar University Delhi).

“Ife and Bilal” is an interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration between artists from South Africa, India, and Turkey. In a live improvised creation using sound and visuals, we explore the Indian Ocean as an archive and an agent, echoing the past with the present.

The performers are also researchers in the fields of history, ethnomusicology, and ontology, and each brings a focus on a different region of the precolonial Indian Ocean system. Our research revealed songs from centuries ago with themes of boats, voyages and separation. From this repertoire, Malayalam songs of Cochin Jews in India, Swahili songs of Zanzibar, and Ottoman songs from Turkey were combined with projected visuals drawing from Arab enquiries into astronomy, alchemy, and navigation, to weave a narrative that travels across the Indian Ocean a millennium ago.

All of these seafaring cultures around the Indian Ocean were deeply connected despite the vast distances between them, and yet some of these histories and heritages are still viewed in isolation, rather than as a collective heritage of the Indian Ocean littoral. An audiovisual production such as this is one way to begin a much needed de-colonial reorientation of the current view of these multiple histories and heritages.