A Thousand Channels: Episode One, by CRiSAP PhD student Syma Tariq and 'Colomboscope 2021: Language is Migrant' - an interdisciplinary platform and festival based in in Sri Lanka.
Taking its title from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (“one way ashore, a thousand channels”), this series features conversations, poetry, specially commissioned sound works and guest radio/audio projects in the lead-up to Colomboscope 2021. The six tracks of each episode encompass various modes, linking remotely across multiple Indian Ocean territories, their diasporic fringes and linguistic/musical enclaves.
Episode One travels between South Asia and Australia with historian and dreamer Samia Khatun and composer Lee Ingleton; to Assam through the lyrical contestations of Miyah Poets; to Bangladesh through its Urdu-speaking communities with lawyer and filmmaker Khalid Hussain and new radio art project Baba Betar, and to the (currently imagined) UK desi dancefloor with DJ Manara. Each piece has accompanying audio notes for more background information, translations and tracklists.