Diasporic Transcriptions
“Everyday object and artwork in one go. Domestic commodity, which is at the same time the conceptual device. The quilt stands/lies/hangs before us as a speculative object without transcending the fact that it is a plain, mundane thing. Not entirely either and yet both, “undecidable”,”
-- excerpt from “Textile Art—Who Are You?” (2001) by Sarat Maharaj
“The history he has been taught is the history of the plantation, the official history of the superstructure; the only history which has been written. But the plot too has its own history. A secretive history expressed in folk song…”
-- excerpt from “Novel & History, Plot & Plantation” (1971) by Sylvia Wynter
Diasporic Transcriptions
2025
7 used clothing quilts, 7 encaustic paintings on handmade paper, 6-channel immersive sound
Site specific, 20 minutes
Diasporic Transcriptions is an installation of seven floating quilts pieced together from the used clothing of multiple generations of her family. Chakrabarti’s textiles are embroidered with maps and landmarks of their places of making. The double-sided quilts are accompanied by seven encaustic paintings on paper made from cloth scraps left behind in the quilting process as contextual footnotes, sharing moments of quilters working and resting. A patchworked soundscape wraps around the space, swaddling viewers in the voices of African-American women in Alabama and Siddi women in Karnataka, whose companionship and counsel have nourished this body of work.
Chakrabarti draws on Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the “plot”— land within plantations allocated to enslaved peoples to plant their own food, which grew to be sites of resistance to the violent extractive logic of the plantation. Diasporic Transcriptions returns to the “plot” through acts of quilting and collective singing that often accompanies it as resonant methods that reveal possibilities in use value, ancestral knowledge, and kinship. The physical act of stitching with a needle between one’s fingers and emitting a musical note with one’s throat, play off of one another, producing subtle variations in both song and quilt. As visitors encounter the harmonising of differently located Black and brown quilt-makers spanning, past, present, and future, Diasporic Transcriptions highlights the radical relationship between visual, tactile, and musical composition, and encourages us to listen beyond the surface.
