Pagtatahip

What echoes linger in the silences of historical archives? Can the sounds of our ancestors, preserved in fragile wax cylinders and fading magnetic tapes, speak truths beyond fidelity?

In Pagtatahip, meLê yamomo invites audiences into an immersive sonic weaving of past and present, where the reverberations of empire and memory are brought into resonance. Rendered through Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, The Listening Space at the Humboldt Forum’s Hörrraum becomes a site of acoustic excavation—a resonant crucible where colonial echoes stir. Archival recordings—of a Malay soldier held in a WWI German camp intoning loss in captivity; of indigenous Kalinga soundscapes captured by early twentieth-century European composers amidst the aesthetic fervor of musical Orientalism; of a Filipino librarian in 1920s Berlin voicing anti-colonial poetry; and of a Javanese dancer on European tour cantillating the Panji epics—resound from Berlin’s Phonogrammarchiv and Lautarchiv as living traces on exile. These spectral voices intermingle with contemporary field recordings by meLê and his brother Jay—lullabies, intimate murmurs between father and son, and echoes from a Southeast Asian village once called home. Together, they form a tapestry of dislocation and return, where the sonic debris of colonial encounter intertwines with familial memory, inviting a listening across an entire century.

This piece weaves a fractured yet vivid tapestry of personal and collective memory—one that beats with the resonances of displacement, colonial legacies, and cultural reclamation. Sound waves within the space becomes a mode of inquiry as listeners navigate an acoustic landscape sculpted by technological imperfections—scratches, static, and ghostly resonances—the witness to histories both hidden and inherited.

Pagtatahip—the rhythmic winnowing of rice casts grains into the air, integrating the wind in the process what stays and what scatters—is a community wisdom at work of filtering significance from noise. As husks feed the earth, discarded yet essential, what forgotten histories nourish our collective understanding? Listen closely; within the whispers of past archives might emerge the clarity of the grains we choose to keep.

Artist
meLê yamomo