haunted - Unmapping Territories at the Southeast of Nowhere

by Nguyễn + Transitory

Borderlands are artificial geopolitical creations, fluctuating to the subjective rhythms of the nation state to which it belongs. Where its histories and narratives have long been lost to the tensions created by the fluctuating line that demarcates its existence. Separated by force and forced to forget, its shared collective past, the lands that lay upon geopolitical fractures, continue to cry with the blood of its inhabitants, bled dry by the shadow of empire that never left. Empire that has shapeshifted and changed its face and skin colour, closer resembling the indigenous faces that are native the land, but empire has never left.

In the pursuit of writing our own histories we have digressed, lost our ways to the myopia of simplified dichotomies, East vs West, good vs bad, us vs them. In trying to empower ourselves through nation state building fantasies, we have fallen into the trap of separation, of false ownership of cultures, histories and narratives that were never meant to be owned or franchised. Shared, collective histories that are not romantic but real, messy and accountable, one that was collectively owned, for all its accolades and all its violences. Can future histories be written that avoid the regurgitation of exploitative troupes, histories that present a myriad of existences and narratives, histories that include all and excludes none?

To reflect through sound the many histories that have been lost or progressing towards histories that will no longer exist, Unmapping Territories at the Southeast of Nowhere is a generative sonic geopoetical drama consisting of multiple oscillators representing different nation states in an imaginary map of the Southeast of Nowhere. The composition is initiated with multiple oscillators playing at the same rhythm before various random generators begin influencing each of the rhythms, representing the arbitrary push pull of internal external geopolitical interferences at the imagined or real borderlands at the Southeast of here, the Southeast of there and the Southeast of Nowhere.