Celestial Fruit on Earthly Ground is a hybrid physical/digital artistic research project that attempts to rethink the ethnomusicological archive from the ground up, rooted in the human traces and encounters around musical instruments. The work presents an exploratory form of digital/physical ethnomusicological archiving founded in “deep collaboration”, fragmentary situated encounters, and an understanding of musical instruments as “epistemic and cultural traces”, technologies embedded with first-person human experiences, cultural migrations and creolisations. This artistic work takes the instrumental lineages of the American “banjo” family, and the oldest existing banjo of the Americas, the Surinamese “creole bania”, as a starting point for exploring this approach – seeking out a living network of musicians, instrument-makers, and tradition-bearers.

This work was developed and supported through the Forecast Platform, with close mentorship by the internationally celebrated composer Du Yun around the theme “Future Traditions of Music”.

The artistic/ethnomusicological work has two parts: the first – artistic collaborations and interventions on-site through “deep collaboration”, and the second – an immersive and interactive archival platform, that operates as a gathering point for traces of these exchanges as music, text, and objects in the physical world digitized on-site or remotely by collaborators. The experience will express a layered and flexible concept of heritage that validates the role of online encounters, while also recognizing their fragmentation and acknowledging the need for interpersonal exchange in building respect for the complex cultural histories we are entangled in, and the musical instruments that bear testimony to these histories and the lived experiences of musicians and technologies of sound.

A Project by Jonathan Reus