Island e: The Roots of Folk Song: An Enduring Rhythm

Li Tze-Mei + Rikey Tenn 

A folk song emanates through primitive sounds or unadorned folk instruments, and it is born from the labouring body or resting body. Once the folk song is born, it will continue to spread beyond geographial boundaries, temporal constraints and its own form. In the proccess of continuously spreading sounds, their performers have agency. Music carries the vibrations of the human spirit and soul, which cannot be bound by geographical boundaries on the map. Inspired by electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel[1], I believe that electronic music has the same character - it brings people together. The same piece of music is sampled and passed around. When it reaches to different regions, it blends in with different styles and affecting the locals until we can't recognize its origins. But each passage of time and space it passes through records and transmits the original rhythm of life.

For the Taiwan Electronic Folk Music (I) project, I adapted Moonlight Sorrow and  Fonggang Minor, while Rikey Tenn paid an effort to examie the transmission structure of Taiwanese folk music from the pre-war period to the post-war period, using the Taitung Tune (Time After Time, A Resigned Tone) as a case study. We will show our thinking paths on Island e. Visual maps may demarcate borders and ideologies, but in our bodies there is another capacity. It is the way in which we  are affected by the vibration of the music. It is a temporal and ungovernable shared experience. In the performance on May 18th, I will perform a time travel of folk music by using electro-acoustic rhythms. The event will also invite electronic music composer, Hsu Chia Wei , to perform Techno, a new work he made this year that incorporated Taiwanese folk music and sound materials.  

All music in GROOVE was represented in digital memory as abstract functions of time.[2]

In the interview article "Laurie Spiegel: Grassroots Technologist", Laurie Spiegel analyzed the similarities between electronic music and folk music from different perspectives such as dissemination, variation,  creation techniques, structural openness and the degree of cultural sharing of musical works.

 "The Expanding Universe", Notes by Laurie Spiegel.

Li Tze-Mei

Li Tze-Mei is a sound artist / sound designer / electronic music producer in Taipei. I'm also a cultural activist caring for environment, indigenous justice and women empowerment. My career belief aims for re-gaining auditory senses for human perceptions. In my works, field recordings, traditional music elements as well as synthesis sound are often used together to create a narrative of the space and time in sound.

Rikey Tenn

Rikey Tenn is the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (since 2017), which is based on the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and its decolonization process. He initiated and co-organized the workshop Nusantara in Future Tense with Singaporean artist collective soft/WALL/studs in 2020. As a researcher, he was involved in The Secret South (curator: Nobuo Takamori) in 2020, as part of which he presented the Nusantara Archive (archive f) His most recent collaborative project, A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, (the first year) is a CREATORS creative/Support Program initiated by C-LAB in 2022.

Hsu Chia-Wei/ Guest

Electronic music composer and sound designer. Using the name Waves of Doppler to publish electronic music compositions and performing as a DJ. He also founded Audio Textural, a production company focused on producing music and conducting sound design. His portfolio includes creating music for theaters, dance performances, video games and commercial advertisement. In 2023, he was the sound designer of Golden Melody Awards and collaborated on various films including, I WeirDo, Goddamned Asura, contributing to  the sound design and music recomposition for the film series Nowhere Man.

[Commoning 1] 

A Sea of Islands: Networked Art Communities in Our Time

Launched in 2017, Nusantara Archive was originally conceived as a framework and methodology for regional decolonization. The word "Nusantara" is a combination of the Sanskrit words "nusa" (island) and "antara" (outer), referring to the vision of the Malay Archipelago (including Southern Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Borneo, the Indonesian Archipelago, and the Southern Philippines), where Malay is the lingua franca. Given the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global art ecosystem in 2020, our initial plans for art residency exchanges between Taiwan and Southeast Asia have also undergone changes. We have begun to shift our attention towards local communities as well as to think through the agency of technological media in the practice of art community, further internalizing the metaphor of the "island" into the reterritorialization of regional networks.

During the post-pandemic community activities on-site, we will invoke Epeli Hau'ofa's theory of the Pacific islands by replacing the notion of "islands in a far sea" with "a sea of islands", and experiment with a mode of decentralized collaboration specific to art communities. With this conceptual shift, the exhibition reflects on its own post/re-colonial situation from the perspective of the sea. Simultaneously, it connects the genealogy of actual islands such as Malaysian islands, Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu, and Austronesia along with historical “Nanyang” (South Sea), with individual islands serving as metaphorical landmarks. This aims to expand the Nusantara Archive residency project both before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. The five consecutive weekends consist of a lecture performance, screenings, discussions, workshops and a music party carried out by five groups of artists and curators. It is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal dynamics and multi-scalar perspectives of the "Sea of Islands" that are not confined by the linear time of progress.

Through the spatial metaphor of the "ocean" as a technology of the sensible that connects the "non-homogeneous" islands, we invite you to reflect with us on the practice of networked commons that art communities have not been able to carry out due to language barriers, technological limitations, and other factors. Finally, by curating a special features on the online Modern Art+ and special screenings, we will create memory landmarks for each week's activities.

Reference：

l   “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 148-161, 1994.

l   “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10 (2): 392-410, 1998

l   ISSUE 52: Archipelago Futurism?「群島未來主義？」Jun 2022

Concept Development

Rikey Tenn／Curator

Rikey Tenn is the founder of the Nusantara Archive Project (since 2017), which is based on the shared history of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and its decolonization process. He initiated and co-organized the workshop Nusantara in Future Tense with Singaporean artist collective soft/WALL/studs in 2020. As a researcher, he was involved in The Secret South (curator: Nobuo Takamori) in 2020, as part of which he presented the Nusantara Archive (archive f) His most recent collaborative project, A Field Guide to Getting Lost in the Southern Universe, (the first year) is a CREATORS creative/Support Program initiated by C-LAB in 2022.

Spatial Design

Wu Chi-Yu／Co-curator

Based in Taipei, Wu Chi-Yu (b. 1986) is a multimedia artist whose works include film, video installation, and photography. He delves into the lost and unestablished links among species, environment, and the technology that constructs human civilization, exploring the complex historical geography of Asia and the interdependence of various beings through multiple narratives. His works have been exhibited and screened at Times Art Museum, Guangzhou (2021); MoCA, Taipei (2020); 2018 Shanghai Biennale; 2016 Taipei Biennial; Beijing International Short Film Festival (2017) and was a resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2014-2015).

Contact：02-25957656 ext.122