Biography
INDWE is a South African interdisciplinary artist working across sound, performance, oral history, and literature. Her practice engages voice, memory, and silence through indigenous knowledge systems, drawing on isiXhosa song traditions, bow instruments, improvisation, and contemporary sonic experimentation. Through vocal work, field recording, and collaborative composition, she creates layered sonic environments that function as both performance and inquiry.
Rooted in listening as a method, her work traces how histories are carried, fractured, and reassembled through sound. Silence is approached not as absence, but as an active and generative force shaping rhythm, attention, and meaning. Her practice has evolved from explicit political narration toward a listening-based approach grounded in healing, relationality, and sonic care. Collaboration remains central, bringing together musicians, vocalists, and community participants in processes of exchange and co-creation.
Synopsis
Of Song and Silence: Polyphonic Frequencies is an experimental sound performance that investigates the relationship between silence, resonance, and the emergence of sound through bow-based practice and live improvisation. The work is grounded in an approach to listening that treats silence not as absence, but as an active, generative field from which sonic material is drawn.
Using voice bow, guitar, and a minimal percussion setup, the performance unfolds as a series of responsive sonic gestures shaped in real time. Rather than presenting a fixed composition, the work operates as a live process of translation—interpreting acoustic phenomena encountered in natural environments such as caves, mountains, flowing water, wind, and open landscapes. These environments are approached not as sites to be reproduced, but as sources of structural and textural influence: echo, decay, rhythm, and spatial diffusion inform the way sound is initiated, sustained, and allowed to dissipate.
Central to the work is the voice bow as a primary instrument. Its capacity to produce sustained tones, overtones, and subtle variations in pitch and texture allows for a close engagement with resonance and micro-sonic shifts. The guitar and percussion extend this field, introducing contrast, interruption, and rhythmic grounding while remaining in dialogue with the bow’s tonal language. Together, the instruments generate a layered sonic environment in which multiple frequencies coexist and interact.
The notion of “polyphony” in this context moves beyond traditional musical definition. It refers to the simultaneous presence of different sonic registers—audible and near-silent, continuous and fragmented, intentional and emergent. Polyphonic Frequencies considers how sound can carry multiple temporalities and presences at once, including traces of environment, body, and instrument.
Silence functions as both a structural and conceptual element within the performance. It frames transitions, creates tension, and allows resonance to be perceived as an extended phenomenon rather than a discrete event. The work invites an audience to engage in deep listening, where attention is directed toward subtle shifts in tone, duration, and spatial movement. In doing so, it challenges conventional expectations of musical performance by foregrounding stillness, restraint, and the threshold of audibility.
Each iteration of the work is site-responsive and contingent on the acoustic properties of the performance space. The arrangement of instruments, the duration of tones, and the pacing of the performance adapt to the environment, making each presentation distinct. This responsiveness positions the work within a live art context where presence, temporality, and space are integral to the unfolding of the piece.
Of Song and Silence: Polyphonic Frequencies ultimately proposes sound as a mode of inquiry - one that engages with listening as a practice of attention, perception, and relation. By drawing from the acoustic intelligence of natural environments and translating it through live performance, the work creates an immersive sonic field in which audiences are invited to encounter sound not as fixed form, but as a living, shifting process.