Sensing On the Move

Abstract

This article is a presentation of, and reflection on the documentary film Music Across Borders. It draws on understandings from oral traditions of the Aŋlɔ-Eʋe language2 , storytelling and music making to discuss ways of making meaning of the everydayness of life in migration in the Global South. The article elucidates examples from the film to address the notion of the ‘multilocality’ of sensing and knowinglinked to concepts of wellness, inequality, and development in migration in the Global South. The article draws on indigenous knowledge and understanding in the Aŋlɔ-Eʋe language to explore the implications of migration on the self, the environment and technology with reference to the MIDEQ Hub’s focus on inequality and development. It illustrates how the film applies the musicality of language and music as language to communicate untranslatable understanding through intuition in the spaces of silence and of the moving body in migration. Processes of storying on screen, create transformative interaction and change which metaphors everyday life and its ‘processes of storying, sensing, and expressing with which people navigate their private and social spaces, including the physical virtual and technological spaces they inhabit with others on the move. Storying and storytelling methodologies used to produce Music Across Borders shed a light on artistic research as a point of synthesis for doing multidisciplinary research in contexts of South-South migration.