This multi-layered sound installation draws from the Law Kyntang or the sacred forest in Meghalaya, a unique ecology based on a traditional north-east belief system. Destruction of any plant or animal life here, or taking any object from this area, is expressly forbidden and it is believed that the forest’s guardian spirits, U Ryngew U Basa, will punish offenders. The project will insert a soundscape of the sacred forest into a defined urban space, thereby transposing the spirit of that eco-system into another matrix. Simultaneously, it will interrogate the prohibition around taking anything from the forest, since the recording of sounds would, by this logic, be taboo.

The site of intervention is an incomplete building, construction having been abandoned, on Barakhamba Road. Originally intended for consumption, it has lapsed into a space of ‘amnesia’, since it cannot be defined in a relational or historical manner, nor in terms of identity. It is a void to which there are no claims, and which invites trespass – a node of dilapidation subjugated by the corporate high-rises of the aggressively mutating city skyline. The project will take over this building for a short duration and summon ‘false memories’ via the forest soundscape – ritually invoking the idea that we ‘remember’ our earlier existence in this location, hypothetically once a forest, as beings not of the urban fold. Triggered by sensors, the soundscape will begin to play as soon as anyone walks into the installation, laid out over three floors of the building.

The work also raises the metaphysical question of whether an isolated entity, without anyone or anything to witness it, can be said to actually exist, or whether the entire universe is generated and dissolved only in relation to the observer.