Muddled Relations | Mapping Caribbean & Indian Ocean Worlds | Fri, Aug 21 | Method Kala Ghoda
Conducted by Vivek Boray
Venue: Method Kala Ghoda
Date: Friday, 21st August
Time: 6 PM Onwards
Because colonial history comes to us pre-sorted, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean world basically never show up in the same sentence. Ask why and the answers are administrative. Different empires, different ships, different departments. Repeat that for two hundred years and a filing decision starts to look like a fact about the world.
Lift the veil and you see both oceans carried people taken against their will and people who left by choice. Both grew music out of whatever survived the labour. In this workshop, the room builds the map together.
Every fragment of the archive will come to you blind.
No author, no place, no date, only a number, and the facilitator keeps the key sealed until the end. You sense what a fragment shares with the map, then commit: a line and a colour, in relation to migration, empire, labour, ecology, sound, memory.
We go a total of three rounds, a minute each leaning on feeling rather than research.
Two soundscapes play throughout on separate speakers, one Caribbean, one Indian Ocean. The room entertains both without collapsing them into one.
By the end you'll have drawn connections between things you know nothing about, and some will be uncannily right. Only then does the key start to open. A few fragments get named, a few are left alone on pur]]]556pose by the facilitator. The conversation that follows centres on how easily two oceans start speaking to each other, given the chance.
Vivek Boray is a curator, DJ, and artist working across sound, performance, and contemporary culture. His practice explores connections between music, geography, memory, and political imagination, with a particular interest in the cultural routes linking South Asia, Latin America, and their diasporas.
He is Co-Director and Curator of Slingshot Festival, curator of CICLOÑA at Cinco Pies in Mexico City, and co-founder of Bangalore DJ night Good Music Only.
He previously hosted Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come on boxout.fm and collaborated with artist Chiraag Bhakta on ThisOnly (2020-23). He has DJed across the U.S., Latin America, and India.