Robert Millis

Installation at Villa Iris, Fundacion Botin, Santander, Spain, 2013.  A sound chandelier playing memories from the old raj-era music rooms of India. A sort of “after the Music Room” (Jalsaghar: The Music Room, by Satyajit Ray a fantastic film from 1958 about the decline of the aristocracy in India). Also a way to examine how sound shifts and reverberates through different mediums, in this case antique glass chandelier parts. Each of the disembodied chandelier pieces had unique sounds and stories that worked both individually and together to create a dream-like, textural soundscape.

This installation was part of the exhibition La Presencia del sonido–“an exhibition that considers an early moment in the history of sound reproduction technology through the particular context of its arrival to the Indian subcontinent. Concerned with the very materiality of the medium, the show explores the implications of auditory technologies, alongside certain colonial legacies, through works of contemporary art.”

Exhibition catalog included an essay and photographs from my Indian gramophone collection. More information is HERE.

10 channel audio installation, antique Indian glass chandelier parts with speakers, Gramophone. All sounds derived from original 78 rpm Gramophone records of the earliest sounds, musicians and artists recorded in India, circa 1902-1915.