2026 — Ndjimu, with Petna Ndaliko Katondolo · International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Short Award)
For Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’s Ndjimu, we worked with recordings of metal being crushed and broken, building a sonic language from the sounds of extraction. The soundtrack follows a descent into the Mutoshi mine in Katanga, where Ndjimu traces the labour of The Rememberers as they extract coveted minerals from ancestral soils for the global technologies built above them.
2026 — Yurugu, for Petna Ndaliko Katondolo and Laurent Van Lancker’s Yurugu –
Invisible Lines, recorded sounds of chopping and cutting were sampled, collaged and layered into an ambient sound bed that could move with and respond to the edit.
Rooted in ancestral ecology, Yurugu – Invisible Lines reflects on the fractures created by colonialism between cultures, humans and non-humans, and the visible and unseen. Through dreamscapes, ancestral rhythms, voices, environmental recordings and organic textures, the film brings these fragments together, exploring memory, connection and the possibility of re-membering what has been dismembered.
2026 — Zamani & Wakati, with Petna Ndaliko Katondolo · Locarno Film Festival
For Zamani & Wakati, we worked with bi-sonification, processing field recordings and environmental sounds to construct an ecological world alongside the image. In the studio, spherical objects were rolled, rotated and recorded, their movements becoming a revolving sonic landscape that moves through the 5.1 sound field. The soundtrack becomes a way of listening to the living world—not as background, but as a repository of memory, where sounds, bodies and environments continually move between past, present and future.
2026 — Overnight Coup Plan, with Marina Xenofontos · Best Art Film, St. Moritz Art Film Festival
Both the edit and sound begin with an imagined question: what if the age of Cyprus were that of a teenager? The work considers a country whose colonial history and transformation into a tourist destination have increasingly produced an image of itself that can eclipse its own sense of identity—a tension that resonates with India and its own colonial and developmental histories.
The edit stretches time to 13 frames, quite literally giving the film the age of a teenager. These temporal shifts, carried into the sound, create playful distortions and unexpected rhythms, allowing the film to inhabit a place caught between inherited histories and becoming.
2024 — From Infra Earth to Extra Sky, with Aarti Sunder · Dystopia Sound Art Biennial, Berlin · West Space, Melbourne
Carrying forward research developed with foley artists in Bombay for The Ear and the Brain, we returned to their studios to make a visual piece around the reconstruction of sound. A foley recordist generates the sounds for a 45-second archival film of Topsy, an elephant taken from India to America, where she became a circus performer, was deemed rebellious, and was eventually publicly electrocuted after being subjected to experiments with electric current.
The work asks what happens when an organism leaves one world and returns to us as an image, a story, or a sound. By filming the foley artist reconstructing Topsy’s movements, we foreground the strange labour of giving sound back to an image—and the ways in which displaced histories of technology, violence and desire continue to return. Aarti Sunder’s writing on the work
2023 — Grounds of Coherence #1, with Shen Xin · EMPAC, New York · Surplus Space, Wuhan
The sound for Grounds of Coherence #1 was built from two long recordings made by the artist while walking through a forest, woven together with downloaded footage of protests in China. Leaves, footsteps, voices and fragments of speech move between landscape and collective presence.
Words are treated as both language and sound—at times carrying meaning, at others dissolving into rhythm, breath and noise. The soundtrack searches for a coherence that emerges from the video work itself.
2020 — Brine Lake (A New Body), with Shen Xin · Gwangju Biennale · Walker Art Center
For Shen Xin’s Brine Lake (A New Body), iodine became a starting point for listening. Rather than trying to make iodine itself audible, we followed it into the places where it is handled, measured and found in the body. During the pandemic, we recorded in laboratories that test blood and urine for iodine. These sounds became part of the film’s sonic world — not as an illustration of iodine, but as traces of the material moving between earth, industry, the laboratory and the body.
The sound was found by following the material: allowing the subject of the work to lead us somewhere unexpected, and listening for what might be heard there.