salt march

2025, performance for 1 halomancer and 4 brass band players in uniform, 30 min

salt march is a performance piece for ambulant brass bands, Featuring musicians dressed in colonial-era military uniforms, it references both, the ubiquitous Indian wedding bands as well as officers who would have patrolled the Inland Customs Line. 

At first asynchronous and discordant as different musicians approach from various directions in the exhibition venue, the music slowly converges into a single, synchronous phrase. Using phasing, fragmentation as well as natural echo of the small alleyways and squares, different, shifting, interlocking and overlapping patterns emerge as part of a polyphonic, musical exchange/jugalbandi across and through barriers, eventually reuniting the performers  in unison. 

Mayalee, the central, salt-divining character of the video work the hedge of halomancy, dressed in her costume made of recycled plastics, precedes the slowly converging, musical processions. She makes lines of salt along the corridors and reads the faiths and futures from the patterns the salts form on the ground. However, these traces are erased by large broom-like contraptions, attached to the tails of the musicians’ uniforms, which they drag behind them throughout their ceremonial patrol.  

The performance seeks to highlight the manifold entanglements, invisible transmissions and cultural reverberations that were - and are! - the unintended byproducts of colonial subjugation and exploitation. By referencing martial rituals of division and control as well as their subversion - salt hedge patrols, Gandhi’s Salt March, the Wagah border crossing-, it reflects upon one of the most profound legacies of colonial extraction: the commodification of soil. Yet it also hints at the inherent futility of such mechanisms and infrastructures of control. Ultimately, no physical border or barrier is able to avert connection, exchange, synchronicity. 

all images above : tate britain 2025. image courtesy ben fischer photography/tate