SRS (Silk Road Songbook) is an audio-video installation that weaves songs of resistance into the land, broadcasting women’s distinct, unruly voices on an ancient Eurasian migration route between Istanbul, Tehran, Tashkent, Bishkek, and Xi’an. By conveying the complex stories emerging from each place and person we worked with, we challenge Orientalist exoticism, cultural tourism, and censorship, disrupting the grand, tidy narrative of the popular perception of “Silk Road.” The 5 songs were generated with collaborators from communities along the route; it is they who chose the landscapes, musical genres, and lyrical content. For each place, their voices are the dynamic driving force; the land is the visual anchor.
Across the projections in the SRS installation, a visual thread is woven through all sites forming the horizon line of the land, connecting different places as co-existing within a commonality and continuity of space. The aural thread across all places is sourced from natural elements found in each environment, a shared sound of the land that forms an atmospheric 6th voice, a voice that carries the wind, water, rustling grass, birds and thunder.
We harnessed our own respective ancestries and migration stories to bookend the project route, forming an itinerary that is at once historically and personally significant. We have built a network of participants to work collaboratively across borders, amplifying their ideas about land and song. The history of land becomes invisible over time as competing occupiers erase history. Marking history at each location is crucially linked to ongoing battles over land: who has a right to live on it, occupy it, and what can be bled from it. Songs enable us to mourn, remember, dissent, and declare, turning sorrow and outrage into hope, fortitude, and joy. Songs become a ready vehicle for voices that are not usually heard. Singing builds fortitude; singing together builds collective joy and defiance. These are songs of empowerment, channels for human agency.
Sound is underrated in ocularcentric cultures; herein lies its potency as an interventionist tool. Cultural historian Michael Denning states: “The decolonization of the ear made possible the decolonization of the territory.” SRS is also informed by the work of scholars such as Valerie Hansen and Peter Frankopan: the common conception of the “Silk Road” as a reductive historic narrative driven by the West is challenged by the argument that it was an abundantly more complex network of land and sea routes with multi-directional cross-cultural exchanges, much of it taking place between Asian cultures, and mainly propelled by migrants and refugees.
We have been working on SRS since 2017 and are over the moon to announce that the installation is now ready to exhibit! From Fall 2017 to Winter 2018, we made research trips to Xi’an, Dunhuang, Hami, Urumqi, Kashgar, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Tehran, Kashan, Abyaneh, Isfahan, Ankara, Bursa, Istanbul; since 2016, we have conducted numerous research workshops (in Turkey, Uzbekistan, China, Canada, and the U.S.) related to the project, and mounted 2 work-in-progress exhibitions in Xi’an and Vancouver (here is a review of one of the exhibitions).
Research, development and production for SRS (Silk Road Songbook) have been supported by numerous organizations and individuals, listed below.
In addition to the funding organizations whose logos are listed below, we would like to thank the following:
• Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Sciences, University at Buffalo
• Office of International Education, University at Buffalo
• Department of Art, University at Buffalo
• United University Professions, Buffalo Center Chapter
• Istanbul Institute of Design - OzU
• Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University
• Substantial Motion Research Network
• O k'inadas Artist Residency, University of British Columbia Okanagan
• International Institute for Central Asian Studies
• School of Art, Design, and Art History, James Madison University
Morteza Namvar, Ramil Niyazov, Asli Akinci Alpert, Özlem Özkal, Ali Burak Erkan, Ipek Yeginsu, Saeed Ensafi, Sahar Bardaie, Pantea Karimi, Somayeh Khakshoor, Farshid Kazemi, Hamin Honari, Mahmoud Nuri, Zilola Saidova, Shavkat Boltaev, Alexander (Sasha) Djumaev, Dmitriy Kostushkin, Saodat G’ulomova, Sadriddin Gulov, Soldan Kurbanov, Nishondjon Atamuradov, Madjer Massanov, Anying Chen, Jingjing Wang, Hui Wang, Sun Xin, Zhi Xiang Wang, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Laura U. Marks, Azadeh Emadi, Thibault de Ruyter, James Millward, Theodore Levin, Franck Bauchard, Kristin Stapleton, Amalia Rubin, Minglu Gao, Ou Ning, Eric Fan Feng, Malinna Li, Carl Lee