"I would like to take this opportunity to thank FST for the support that you have made available. Much of the work that you are hearing about has been made possible as a result of the FST grant. The successes are very visible and I cannot think of a more successful partnership than this one, where such striking results are visible."
Arpan Sharma
Samrakshan Trust
GUARDIAN NEWS BUREAU SHILLONG, FEB 9: Two artistes of Northeast have come up with a project that aims to bridge the gap between the materialistic and the indigenous.
‘Trespassers will ( not) be Prosecuted’, as the project is called, seeks to create and ambience of the dense forests in some urban location, giving the beholder a feel of the Nature – albeit in sound.
Sonal Jain of Shillong and Mriganka Madhukaillya of Guwahati have come up with a database of a variety of sounds drawn from Law Kyntang, a sacred forest in Mawphlang.
They then reframe it to suit the location where the system is installed and create a “ soundscape” to give the people a feel of the forests through the sounds of trees, crickets, birds, toads et al . “ We have worked in this project for over five years and the main purpose of this installation of the project is to facilitate discourse and conversations and environments we live.
We recorded the true sound of nature. People in this materialistic world have forgotten the value of Nature and that’s what we are trying to bring it out,” Sonal said.
The duo, whose collaborative is called Design Machine Collective, has presented their work at the façade of Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in system was installed for three- and- half months.
“We want to bring about the ambience of nature to people especially the youth who have not heard such sound of nature in their life,” Sonal said.
"The 5th Avenue, one of the busy streets in the city,” Jain said.
The work explores the relationship of architecture, spatial perception and the concept of non- narrative musical form. These elements are essential to this sound installation. This work attempts to use sound as an alternate way to map physical spaces via creating a subjective ‘ ideoscape’ in each observer / listener’s mind.
This internal soundscape catalyzed through a public site, with subliminal notions of memory, ecology and geography experienced through the auditory mode rather than through the visual, simultaneously compelled a realigning of sensibility to the external space, Mriganka Madhukaillya said.