Moushumi Bhowmik is a singer, writer and practice-led researcher based in Kolkata, India. She collects sounds and recordings outside of the periphery of our listening orbit, sounds unheard, left behind and hard to listen to, featuring questions of borders and displacement. She is drawn to sounds from the area of South Asia, like Nepal and Bengal. As ‘Bengal’ she refers to West Bengal Indian and Bangladesh. In her research and practice of collecting songs she highlights the importance of similarity in between for example of sounds songs from Nepal and Bangladesh. Even if she couldn’t understand Nepalese, she looked for the familiar in there, by this emphasising to look for what is connecting rather than dividing and different but also acknowledging point of view and own perspective.
She participated in the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020, exploring acoustic archaeology practice. It was about recording in ‘pre-recording time’ before the recent recording machines came. The practice was based on visiting archaeological sites and trying to listen to them. Uncovering layers of soil on the sites is the analogy for uncovering layers of sounds in the record by constant listening. The technique is, as Moushumi points out, based on speculation and imagination. I very agree with that because I have been very struggling to understand such concept (if I got to understand the actual meaning correctly at all).
Moushumi did a workshop on the sound of memory. She said that people often bringing up memories from childhood based on sounds. She recorded a story of a girl Apple working in the gallery, originally from Philippines, who manages the kitchen. She mentioned how the sounds of the kitchen and cooking instantly remind her of her parents, and then, when she sees or hears planes, it reminds her that she cannot go back because they died. This story brings thoughts back to idea of displacement and it instantly reminded me the piece I was delighted to work on last year. I was scoring the short film based on childhood memories of my friend Lucie Trinephi who as five year old escaped with her parents the war in Vietnam. Lucie got a flashback based on the sound of helicopter many decades later and it was the actual sound memory, which opened the whole chain of many other visual as well as sonic memories.
Even if I could not entirely understand all the concepts Moushumi was talking about, I really appreciated her lecture because it was carried out in a very poetic way, and due to her determination to amplify the sounds and voices of people often coming from the place of struggle as was, for example, the story of my friend Lucie as well.