Romila
Artist in Residence | April/May 2023
Romila is a writer, facilitator and cyber-mystic of kejawen and Zoroastrian ancestry based on the never surrendered, ancestral Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) village site of Sen̓áḵw.
Using storytelling as a portal and liminality as a venue, Romila’s work explores futures we can remember and pasts we can reimagine. Through jam karet, an Indonesian incantation to bend time, Romila curates explorations of liminality including: language as a portal for time travel, grief as a venue for timelessness and non-linearities of queerness.
Child of a dream interpreter, great-grandchild of birthing doulas, Romila carries the gifts of intuition, groundedness and future-telling to hold spaces to gather in community through literature, spellmaking and ritual.
Merkayangan: A Study of the Realms
Merkayangan is a 4DSOUND simulation of the seven kejawen realms using traditional Javanese instruments, sounds in nature and archival recordings. This project uses modern technologies (leveraging LOBE’s dedicated spatial sound studio) and spiritual technologies (kejawen mysticism and Javanese instruments such as the gamelan and angklung) to reconstruct a pre-colonial recollection of these liminalities while also engaging in new ways in its depiction.
It is a reclamation project blending archives, academic research and cultural knowledge to re-document these understandings into present-day discourse through auditory art as storytelling. Using slendro and pelog, Javanese pentatonic scale tunings, as tools for “realm building,” this project offers an auditory simulation of the realms and the experiences within them including: inducing jam karet or “stretching of time” through tempo experimentation; creating auditory silhouettes of mahluk alus or “unseen beings;” and symbolizing closed knowledge.
It is of importance to state that, in developing this project, the artist upholds the spiritual responsibility of keeping all and any dimensional gateways closed in recognition that — on our physical plane of existence — the territories this work occurs on was never surrendered and the territories — unseen and parallel to the ones we know and do not know today — are not to be disturbed.