Chromosthesia: Towards a Poetics and Aesthetics of the Whole Mangrove World

Chromosthesia (the sound of colour) investigates the Sonic and Sensory Rites of African Migration across four bodies of water: the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea; the red sea and Mediterranean, the Indian ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and Carribean Sea. Khaleeji Creole is a sonic and linguistic ethnographic project that seeks to build a database of (oral, aural and oral history) interviews with long-term inhabitants of the United Arab Emirates and wider Gulf region. Interviews will revolve around language, verbal arts, music and performance, and will be structured around histories of migration; identity and belonging, themes that are intended to evoke experiences of hybridity/multilingualism).

Chromosthesia investigates soundscapes of errantry and migration along 15 sites of the global mangrove archipelago through the fundamental notion of sonic rights: the very relationship of sound and music to human rights. The project will issue in an unprecedented archive of 70-120 filmed (camera operator to film) oral history interviews to be deposited at NYUAD; hundreds of hours of recorded soundscapes and musics of the global mangrove archipelago to be deposited at NYUAD; together with Khaleeji Creole this will forge the first global archive of vernaculars of the global mangrove archipelago centring the UAE and the Arabian Gulf in processes of globalisation and creolisation and their attendant soundscapes and oral histories.

Project Researchers