Fieldlines took place in December 2019 in Rajasthan, India.
The project was made possible through a Goethe-Institut Co-Production Fund grant, in collaboration with the Magnetic Fields Festival, the Teichmann brothers, and Noland.
Over the course of ten days, we worked with North Indian folk musicians and experimental musician Bidisha Das from Kolkata. The participants’ musical traditions and life realities differed greatly from one another. Verbal communication was limited, passing through three translations: from English to Hindi, and from Hindi to local dialects. This made the process of finding a shared musical language in such a short time especially fascinating.
For rehearsals and recordings, we set up a room in the palace and began making music together in the week leading up to the festival. During the festival itself, we opened this room to the public, allowing visitors to directly experience the process. By the time of the final performance on the festival’s main stage, connections had formed — not only with the audience but also with the festival’s local staff — and these relationships carried over into the onstage atmosphere, despite the formal setting.
The process was accompanied by mediator Akshata Shetty and documented by the Delhi-based film collective Elefant.
Musicians: Hakim Khan (kamaicha), Kultla Khan (dholak), Firoz Khan (khartal), Sumitra Devi (vocals, harmonium), Gebrüder Teichmann (live electronics), Uli Teichmann (wind instruments), Bidisha Das (sound objects). Mediator: Akshata Shetty. Video documentation: Elefant film collective, Delhi
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