Moving With and For the Song: The Story of The Travelling Archive

The Travelling Archive is a shared space of listening to songs and sounds from Bengal and other places. Moushumi Bhowmik will talk about how she came to build this space, alone and with others, over the past two decades. She will talk about what moved her and how, as she moved following sounds and traces of sounds, as an amorphous map of a broken and imagined land unfurled before her eyes.

About the Speaker:

Moushumi Bhowmik is a singer, writer and collector of songs and sounds. She is based in Kolkata but travels between India, Bangladesh and the UK and her work is largely centred on the question of what and where home is. She collaborates with artists and scholars across disciplines and languages. Moushumi is also the main caregiver/caretaker of The Travelling Archive: Field Recordings and Field Notes from Bengal (www.thetravellingarchive.org), co-created with sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar.  She has recently submitted her doctoral thesis on the wax cylinder recordings of Arnold Bake from Bengal at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She composed music for the Bengali movie Matir Moina (The Clay Bird) which won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 2002 and Best Music at Kara Film Festival, Karachi, in 2003.

Several other events have been planned in connection with Ms. Bhowmik's visit to the institute (20--24 April 2022); please visit "https://sites.google.com/view/artiste-at-the-institute/events" for more information.