Perennial Resonances II

The other plants are older,

Some of them came a hundred and fifty years ago when Japan opened up,

Some of them came after World War II,

But this one is different,

Paspalum urvillei is from South America,

It reached here about the time I was born,

We grew up together, the whole time, here on the riverbank,

But neither of us has ever gotten used to the place

– Hiromi Itō, Wild Grass on the Riverbank (2005)

In Wild Grass on the Riverbank (2005), the Japanese poet Hiromi Itō positions herself and an ‘invasive’ wild grass as twin migrants growing up along a riverbank, a foreign home that neither has fully adjusted to. Perennial Resonances, whose first act was at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, begins with this image and its suggested proposition: that belonging is not a place arrived at, but a relation practised, over and over, with whoever else has washed up on the same bank.

The phrase ‘perennial resonances’ suggests a cultural resistance to transience, bordering, and purity: perennial, as in a story that refuses to conclude, persisting by variation – as song, myth, or gossip – with each retelling becoming a relational variant of itself; resonances, as in an induced vibration, such as when stories travel through bodies, places, and technologies, each embodying its own frequency. Perennial Resonances proposes holding relation, negotiation, and errantry as the terms by which stories, species, and selves are made and remade, iteration by iteration, act by act, asking not where a story comes from, but who – and what – it grows with, and what it lets go.

In today's increasingly interconnected yet polarised and fragmented world, is there still a possibility for the Global Majority to relate to each other’s variable conditions with solidarity and beyond language, geography, and the hair-splitting differences that so often fracture political movements before they can agree on anything at all? This act of Perennial Resonances attempts to address this question by bringing together three films made in disparate geopolitical contexts that explore different kinds of relation, errantry, and naming. In We Will Be Who We Are (Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda), two friends marry each other as a pact, choosing who they become through a relation of their own making – variability appears here as something chosen rather than administered. Song of the Exile (Law Yuk Mui) traces the now-absent maritime routes of the Royal Interocean Lines, once connecting Japan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and South America, through Naamyam singing, Communist radio propaganda, and the Foley sounds of shipboard labour, refusing to settle neatly into any categories of geography and time. In City of Poets (Sara Rajaei), street names in a small metaphorical city shift from poets to war dead – naming here serves as the site where belonging is decided and undecided again. The programme’s curatorial gesture is not meant to present one story or inheritance that stands in for a shared condition, but to place three unrelated stories in the same space in order to allow their fluid rhythms of difference to resonate with one another.

According to Édouard Glissant, identity is relational: the self is not fixed but is made and remade through relation with others, the way the grass and the poet grew into each other on the riverbank, or the way the Boi and Aya in We Will Be Who We Are do. Yet an individual made of shifting parts can also be sliced and sorted, flattened into legible categories, fragmented, atomised, turned into consumables and consumers. This fragmentation is what Song of the Exile’s sonic fragments actively work against when they piece together a memory no shipping ledger ever recorded. 

In the Poetics of Relation, Glissant affirms  that relation does not require sameness to hold. His right to opacity insists that entering relation with another does not require becoming transparent to them, reducible to a shared category legible from the outside. A riverbank of unrelated grasses, like a Global Majority, can hold together in relation without collapsing into one legible history. What gathers dispersed histories, solidarities, restitutions, inheritances into a political claim is not identity but the willingness to be changed by an encounter, without first requiring the other to become knowable, countable, the same. Such a willingness defies the rhetoric of origin and purity that nationalist jingoism leans on.

What remains irreducible is not a failure of solidarity but its condition of possibility. Opacity is not what solidarity has to overcome; it is what solidarity has to hold on to. Where political argument seeks agreement – with disagreement compounding into fracture – story does not need agreement to resonate. Myth, gossip, and song can hold differences in the same space without first negotiating them into consensus, creating the shared ground that political movements so often cannot find.

Boi and Aya’s lavender marriage is a legal fiction that protects a real intimacy, a pact that lets them become who they are together rather than who Freetown has already decided they must be. The film treats kinship not as something fixed at the start, but as a form worked out continually, in relation, under pressure, and in code (a purple thread, braided words, a shared dance) rather than in declaration. What resonates here is not the wedding itself but everything it frees the two of them to keep becoming afterward.

Law Yuk Mui reconstructs a vanished shipping route, the Royal Interocean Lines, entirely out of sound: a sailor’s rust-chipping, a Naamyam ballad, a Cultural Revolution–era broadcast, and a monologue spoken by someone known only by a repeated first name – according to the narrator, Chinese Indonesians were pressured to use non-Chinese names, so he was named Jonathan Jonathan, repeating his first name instead of using a Chinese family name. No single source is allowed to carry the whole story; each is a fragment resonating against the others. The origin of the memory becomes impossible to isolate and only the composite feeling of displacement remains.

Through a collage of personal archive footage and photographs, the history emerges of a small, metaphorical city where all the streets are named after poets. The town's psychogeography defines the mental and emotional state of its inhabitants, who live in a utopian illusion founded on poetry. When the system changes, and war begins, new neighbourhoods emerge to accommodate the refugees, and the existing street names are replaced by new ones. Abrupt and sweeping upheavals lead to confusion among the city's residents, who soon find themselves lost amid the memories of the forgotten poets.