Awumbuk
Awumbuk: There is an emptiness after visitors depart. The walls echo. The space which felt so cramped while they were here now seems weirdly large. Sometimes everything seems a bit pointless. The indigenous Baining people who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea are so familiar with this experience that they name it awumbuk. They believe departing visitors shed a kind of heaviness when they leave, so as to travel lightly. This oppressive mist hovers for three days, leaving everyone feeling distracted and apathetic. To counter it, the Baining fill a bowl with water and leave it overnight to absorb the festering air. The next day, the family rises very early and ceremonially flings the water into the trees, whereupon ordinary life resumes.
T. Watt Smith. 2015
Working in a team of multi-disciplinary students, we worked to capture the raw emotion experienced by this small death into an audio-visual piece. The team worked cooperatively in creating one cohesive piece, outlining the key physical and emotional stages of the ceremony, by which the tribe set out a bowl of water to capture the cloud of dismay and thick emptiness and empty this bowl to cleanse themselves of Awumbuk. The team members each worked in layers to compose each component to provide a rich, full representation of the experience: layering sound compositions pulled from noise-making sessions; analogue visuals created in-studio; animated composition sequences created in Adobe After Effects; and composite visual overlays in Max MSP. The outcome captures 4 minutes of collective footage taking the audience on an emotional journey similar to that of the tribe. The beginning sets the tone of the tranquil peace experienced in day-to-day life, before the harsh and disruptive build of activity disturbed the otherwise placid waters. The flurry of vivid colour and emotion prevail throughout the parting of loved ones, leaving a muddied, thick, and heavy atmosphere. This swamped emotional disarray is then collected, in ceremony, and cleared from the atmosphere to restore the original, undisturbed tranquillity.
