Breathing… Whirling...

Rhythm sustaining life - movement of the wind through the body and spiraling around it. The animation of the mind and the body, and the world around it -the physical, metaphorical and mythological- are shaped by these rhythms. Rhythms existing, overlapping, renewed and invented enable the perception and navigation of the pluriverse through, visible, invisible and hidden patterns, frequencies, and movements. The ninth edition of Colomboscope 2026 is an exercise of attunement to the varied dispositions of rhythm that is recognized as movement- obscured, uncharted, recurring and imagined, as time, as a collapse of temporalities, as resistance, as hunger, as repetition, and as invocations. Together with artists, sonic practitioners and agitators, performers, scholars, activists, and cultural practitioners, the festival will chart through multiple activations that sonically and visually traverse the many realms of interwoven, contrasting, and resonating rhythms brought in circulation for this edition. ‘Song of the circling spirit,’ stems from the Nigerian-British poet and novelist, Ben Okri’s literary work Songs of Enchantment, where it enables a clarity of vision beyond chaos to new horizons, recognizing the importance of “re-dreaming” rhythms and trajectories that have the potential of charting alternate courses for the self and others. By rekindling the polyrhythms and reuniting human existence with the elements and beyond, the celebration of rhythms in this edition is a reassertion of interdependencies that enable being and becoming.

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​The sonic transmission of narratives and histories encompass the texture of language, firmness and elasticity of terrain, the whispers of the wind, the smell of rain, and the taste of grain. These oral transmissions across time, space, and generations enable a grounding of self and surrounding, an affiliation beyond kin to the land, sea and the desert, an anchor that binds yet does not insist on proximity. These oral traditions train in the navigation of the world that simultaneously equips and empowers with the poetic episteme embedded in-between the rhythm of verses, ragas, gestures, and movements. This knowledge enables and provides vocabulary for new rhythms of resistance, opacity, and subversion against imposed and dominating patterns of systemic oppressions and violence that enforce a curtailment of movement and erase and discontinue the flow of embodied and situated knowledge.

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