teyat vivan

For teyat vivan, sound researcher and activist Neha Spellfish learns her grandmothers’ dialect, thereby retracing her Afro-American roots. Spellfish’s ancestors spoke a variant of the New Orleans and Texas African American Vernacular English (AAVE). AAVE denotes dialects that emerged during the time of slave trade when Southern English and African Creole languages influenced each other in many ways. These dialects, spoken even today in Afro-American communities, suffer from the racialisation stigma in the US.

In her auto fictional performance, Neha Spellfish employs the power of spoken word and acoustic collage to stimulate the physical dimension of sensual perception. She takes her audience on an ethnolinguistic trip between the invocation of the ancestors and the haunting of colonial trauma, between contemporary philosophy and political action, between past and future.