Generative sound piece and a series of spatial objects

With an interest in changing environments under the relentless pressure of human activities, artists Eldar Tagi and Lena Pozdnyakova explore the complex dynamics of the nature-culture dichotomy surrounding the discourse of the Anthropocene, the role of the socio-political sphere, identity, and tradition in forming these. The project emerged with their desire to understand the complexity of personal roots and the urgency of rethinking traditions in the current context of a global ecological crisis. 

As part of their artistic research, their project draws on the vocal traditions of indigenous groups in Inner Asia, who practiced throat singing—one of the world's oldest music forms, originating among Turko-Mongol tribes. During the communist era, throat singing, along with many other traditional music practices, underwent tides of radical transformations, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it emerged both as a cultural meme infused into the globalized sonic mixture and as a symbol, and a connection point to the authentic local identity. In the language of ethnomusicology, throat singing techniques are categorized as a context-specific cultural aspect associated with local rituals and storytelling. On one hand, this technique can be seen as a dynamic force at the nexus of multiple interconnected tensions and cultural politics. On the other hand, accounts of throat singing in Inner Asia show how nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples used this technique to communicate with both the natural and supernatural worlds. Specifically, these vocal techniques were employed to imitate the sounds of the harsh winds of the steppe, natural flora, and fauna and to communicate with spirits. Such "sonic snapshots" or "sonic holography" become a synesthetic journey through cultural memory, demonstrating a deep understanding of the interdependence between humans and their environment. Furthermore, it challenges the anthropocentric worldview, emerging as a "musical intuition within the animistic universe" embedded with sensing the ecosystem at large. This intrinsic interconnectedness is then reflected through the "feedback" system of the body and expressed as a multi-sensory experience. The essence is an incarnate presence and unity—an attempt to connect with the world on the levels of the body and cosmology. The spatial composition here mirrors the human voice with it digital reconstruction and a host of synthetic and natural environments. This disorienting effect aims to underscore a blurred boundary between past and present, history and life, human and nature, authentic and artificial. Moreso, the sound here carries not only a symbolic and aesthetic role but also uses resonances and intensity to facilitate physically-perceivable interaction.

“In this project, we explore the ephemerality of the voice as sound. Regardless of the culture, a voice holds a special significance in our perception. It indicates presence and connection. While commonly associated with a body, a disembodied voice doesn’t lose its significance but rather gains a different aura and even more profound meaning. This was noticed by the film theorist and composer Michel Chion, who coined the term ‘acousmétre’—a ghostly sonic presence of a narrator in a film devoid of attachment to a physical body. The sounds flow in and out of a speaker array, continuously transforming the listening space from more synthetic to more human. The generative aspect of the composition accomplished through probability functions and feedback systems pays tribute to the cosmogonal attitude of the original practice. The sounds are always there, unceasingly changing as listeners temporarily pass through the space.”

The visual component of the listening space adds another layer to the environment. Körpe and the imagery on them represent an exploration of the Central Asian ethos, encapsulating the temporal and cyclical nature of existence through the lens of regional landscapes and cultural motifs, familiar to Central Asian people and yet altered by the Soviet era. Confronted by the clash of these different worldviews, artists depict their positionality by overimposing zoom-in and zoom-out scales toward their worldview, cultural heritage, and the climate change paradigm.

One side of the körpe features a broad, undetailed image of Kazakhstan's natural landscape from space, emphasizing the immensity of the environment and the human's seamless integration within it. The reverse side presents a collage that overlays cultural patterns onto the land that has been and continues to be severely damaged by human activity –marks from the nuclear tests, footprints of activities around Baikonur, shrinking water bodies, and oil-drilling plants, sites of animal agriculture, melting glaciers, and urbanization. These perspectives, both macro (zoom out) and micro (zoom in), offer a nuanced narrative of human interaction with the environment at large on a planetary scale, one that is ever-evolving and marked by the passage of time and seasons not limited to the linear perception of time, similarly to the sound piece. By incorporating fragments of natural sites to collages with such elements as the traditional calendar, migration cycles of nomads, and artifacts of human-animal relationships, the project also explores questions about human impact on human and non-human beings.

Artists’ websites:

https://www.eldartagi.com/
https://tinyurl.com/lenathezwo
https://www.the2vvo.com/

1) Zoya Kyrgys (2002) cites as the earliest references of Kai- (xai-) and kaila (kailau) terms that generally considered to be the older Turkic words meaning “to sing with the throat” and are used to describe guttural singing styles in Xakass, Altai, Shoorian, Chuvash, Yakut, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh languages. In his research of throat singing in Tuvan traditions, Robert Oliver Beahrs, Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (2014), cites Tatarintsev 1998: 59-72 for a linguistic discussion of Circa-Altai throat-singing terminology.

2) In his research, Robert Oliver Beahrs writes: “Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Soviet colonization and nation-building within the former Russian Imperial territory mobilized ethnographic knowledge about indigenous groups in the Inner Asian region (Hirsch 2000: 5-12). That nation-building effort sought to end nomadic backwardness by framing it as a kind of innocence, which was then used to justify colonization as a means of saving the nomads by helping them become more sophisticated. Soviet policies also framed nomadic backwardness as beastly and in need of neutralization. To this end, mobile pastoralists were made to live settled lives and cultural practices were desacralized and institutionalized. (p.23)” “While Pyotr E. Ostrovskikh (1870-1937), Russian ethnographer who was the first to link judgment about peoples with judgements about the practices, does not appear to make value judgments about the singing he heard, he does impute the characteristics of that singing to entire peoples. That is, while Ostrovskikh identifies throat-singing as a “distinct” practice, he actually describes his observations as “typical of many Asian peoples who use throat sounds.” (p.17)
Therefore, early ethnographers constructed the narrative around the throat-singing in a way that converted system’s value judgements of vocal sounds into value judgements concerning nomadic peoples and given scarcity of historic documentation of indigenous groups in Inner Asia, these accounts have been extremely influential in framing reductive representations of diverse groups and their cultural practices through colonial lens. This resulted in many accounts of practices being lost or generalized.

3) Levin, Theodore Craig, and Süzükei Valentina. Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond. Bloomington (Ind.): Indiana University Press, 2011.

4) A decolonized view on nomadic sensibility opens up throat-singing practice not a product (i.e. a song, a text, a costume) and, and hence suggests that this practice cannot be evaluated like one. R.O. Bearhs suggests that it is also not just a technique or an aesthetic, rather, it is a sensibility—a disposition, a “musical intuition within the animistic universe,” as German Popov, a long-time collaborator with Tuvan throat-singers Huun-Huur-Tu and Sainkho Namchylak, has put it. With this, the project becomes an attempt to depict the experience of “embodied” presence without ascribing to value judgment – presenting an alternative to the Eurocentric and Soviet-centric notion of aestheticized experience ascribed to cultural depictions.