Suvani Suri

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will examine the anatomy of the collective song We Shall Overcome, through aggregating data about its musicality, structure, popularity maps, analytics, and audience interactions such as YouTube comments, of its various iterations across time, geography, language and political context. Suvani Suri is the Coordinator for this project.

Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher currently based in Delhi, India. She works with sound and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, collective interventions, data compositions, sketches, experimental lectures and workshops. A graduate of the New Media Design programme (2014) from the National Institute of Design, Suvani's works have been exhibited at the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), Mumbai Art Room (2018), Sound Reasons Festival VI (2018) and Khoj Curatorial Intensive South Asia (2019). Given her experience she is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. Amarnath Praful, a visual artist and an Associate Faculty in the Photography Design Master’s program at the National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar, will be her artistic collaborator in this project.

This project with the working title Anatomy of a Collective Song, will look at the digital presence of the song We Shall Overcome. While the song has its antecedents as a folk and gospel music, it later became a popular song for resistance, protest and solidarity. There are many translations of the song in various languages both in India and across the world. This song is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of people across time, geography, political context and language. On a global video streaming platform like YouTube the song aggregates a huge corpus of data that comprises of its many audio and video renderings and iterations, different layout interfaces, statistics of viewership and affective materials such as likes and dislikes, subscriptions, and textual materials like comments.

This project will attempt to find an artistic medium to express this vast array of data produced around this song, including its musicality, structure, arrangement, popularity maps, audience interactions and numerical indices. While the process involves aggregation of all this data, the envisioned outcome of the intermedia work, may start to take shape only as the project progresses. It will also semantically unpack the phrases in the song. The project will delve into questions such as, “Who are we?”, “What is to be overcome?” and “When is that someday?” The project wants to consider the collective pronoun “we” as a puzzle or problematic rather than an utopic universal imagination. Especially because, the dimensions of the term “we” keeps shifting, in the various political resurrections of the song. The diachronic nature of YouTube comments also becomes a timeline that marks the reappearances of the song in various political contexts.

The outcome of the project may be an intermedia work. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the process documentation and the intermedia work. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to explore the digital presence of a collective song, across its multiple iterations, that has had tremendous impact in various resistance movements, including in South Asia, up to very recent events of dissensus.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.