Echoes (2025)

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Suspended in air, her body waits—not for movement, but for transmission. In Echoes, Kawita Vatanajyankur transforms the act of bell-striking into a machinic ritual where grief becomes a system of vibration rather than a private emotion. Her body is bound horizontally and repeatedly propelled into a golden ceremonial bell, the kind used in Buddhist funerary rites across Southeast Asia, including the cremation of her late father. Each impact generates a resonance that does not simply travel through space—it returns. It insists. It refuses disappearance.

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Here, resonance functions as a theory of memory. It is neither representation nor recollection but recurrence. What returns in Echoes is not the past itself, but its after-presence—a residue that persists in affective and material forms. Vatanajyankur treats grief as labour, not metaphorically but mechanically: timed, repetitive, relentless. The work confronts the condition Bernard Stiegler calls the “technics of memory”—the externalisation of remembrance into material processes beyond the human. Memory, in this sense, is not what one holds inside; it is what survives outside.

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A generative AI, trained on her father’s original writings, emits Morse-like pulses that dictate the rhythm of her collisions with the bell. The system does not simulate his voice—it performs a form of machinic inheritance, producing a nonhuman agency shaped by the trace of the dead. The choreography is thus authored by absence: the father is not present, yet he continues to transmit. The machine becomes a carrier of grief across temporalities, extending mourning beyond the biological limit of life.

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Echoes resists the sentimental economies of loss. Instead, it proposes grief as a structural force—an engine of repetition in which love does not end but mutates into signal. The work asks whether technology can become a vessel of spiritual continuity, not by resurrecting the dead but by enabling memory to circulate as vibration. If the human body forgets, the machine remembers. And when both strike in unison, they do not produce harmony—they produce persistence.