Transmigration: Rooting Through Bodies and Borders (Sound of the Mountain)

Application summary

Transmigration: Rooting Through Bodies and Borders is a collaborative 15-month artistic research project by Czyżyk & Luck, exploring ancestral sound traditions of nomadic and semi-nomadic communities through film, performance, and sculpture. We will work with artists, musicians, and craftspeople across Bolivia, Bulgaria, the Eastern Himalayas, and the Nordic region to investigate how sound, ritual, and animal-human movement carry embodied knowledge. We begin in La Paz with composer Carlos Gutiérrez and OEIN, co-creating wind instruments from clay and bamboo and filming experimental performances shaped by high-altitude air. In Bulgaria, we document the Kukeri ritual, a spring tradition rooted in protection and sonic disruption. In Mago (Eastern Himalayas), we return to a remote mountain village Zethang, we reached in 2024, where nomadic families live without electricity or signal, communicating through walkie-talkies and subtle gestures. Earlier this year, we led workshops in Meghalaya, India, with local schoolchildren, exploring sound and clay as shared creative tools. These encounters, built on listening and co-creation, anchor our approach. The project culminates in a long-form experimental film, sculptural instruments, a performative soundwalk in Helsinki’s Vartiosaari, a live-score screening in Bristol, and an immersive installation commissioned by Malmö Museum. The Malmö work reimagines transmigration through avian and human migration, incorporating community workshops, docufiction, and sensory ritual into a dreamlike, interactive dome environment. Transmigration imagines movement not as loss, but as entanglement – a shared, resonant continuity across bodies, histories, and worlds.