Ansuman Biswas
has a wide-ranging international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. He often works across and between conventional boundaries such as those between science, art and industry, for instance, or between music, dance and visual art. His expertise is in interdisciplinarity, fostering relationships, synthesising, comparing, facilitating, and standing outside particular viewpoints.
At the core of this diversity is the practice of vipassana meditation.
www.ansuman.com
23:36,13/12/2009, +12° 46′, +77° 33′
All we humans can ever say to each other is only a sad spiralling soliloquy in a barren void, until we learn to listen to those who are not like us.
We have always been surrounded by voices, each speaking its own language in its own unique timbre, with its own opinions. But lately we have become confused by our own virtuosity.
The more concerned humans have become with the sound of our own voice the more deaf we have become. Gradually we have shouted down the others completely and stifled them. Forests and oceans have faded away and fallen silent until we are left only with the chattering and moaning and roaring of ourselves and our machines.
My aim is to open up the conversation again. One method I use is to simply listen in wild places, places that humans have not yet smothered. If you listen in the right way to all the non-human spirits, the creatures, the weather, the earth turning and the stars twinkling, then the listening wells up through the breath and you find that one of the voices happens to be your own. Then a conversation can begin.
This conversation was recorded on a phone at 11.36pm on December 13th 2009, near the Kalkere forest on the edge of Bannerghata Park, Karnataka, South India.