obuyile - usuku owesithupha (day 6) - 2024

obuyile – a composition for four cellists

obuyile (“the one who returns” in isiZulu) explores methods of healing through sound, rest, and counter architectures. Emerging from an ancestral dream, the work developed through a multi-year process of sonic and spatial mapping, and premiered as a live performance installation at St Giles’ Cathedral during the 2021* Edinburgh Art Festival.

Over nearly ten years, in cities I had lived in - particularly Glasgow and Edinburgh - Ideveloped a practice of recording vocal melodies and harmonies in response to urban environments marked by colonial histories, a practice that in retrospect offered a way to navigate them. These recordings became the foundation of the score, developed in collaboration with Taner Kemirtlek, mapping an emotional and spatial journey through landscapes of inherited trauma.

The composition unfolds over seven days, echoing a story shared with the artist by historian Lisa Williams during her walking tour, about abolitionist Frederick Douglass. While in Edinburgh, Douglass taught himself a hymn from home on a fiddle over the course of a week, an act he described as a form of healing. In obuyile, time functions both as a framework for repair and as a reflection of how trauma fractures lived experience.

Rest is embedded as a central compositional strategy. Informed by the isiZulu word phefumula - meaning both “breath” and “rest”- moments of silence operate as acts of refusal and healing. From a Southern African Nguni psychological perspective, dreaming is understood as an active mechanism for ancestral communication and repair, a worldview that underpins the work’s structure.

Alongside the music, I developed architectural garments in collaboration with Asia Przytarska, informed by ukombathiswa, a Xhosa concept meaning “to envelop or protect with cloth.” During live performances, the garments are placed over the music stands in moments of rest, allowing the work to continue in a different register.

obuyile exemplifies my sustained relationship with indigenous technologies and ancestral knowledge as tools for reimagining.

Creative Director, composer, musical arranger: Thulani Rachia

Cellists: Futo Yamame, Simone Seales, Claire Garbeddian, Justyna Jablonska in . Photo: Rachel McBrinn

Transcriber and musical arranger: Taner Kemirtlek

Videographer: Rachel McBrinn

Editors: Rachel McBrinn, Daniel Hughes

Sound: Chris Flynn

Garment architecture construction: Asia Przytarska

Garment architecture print design: Thulani Rachia

Print design into vector: Christian Noelle Charles

*Day 7 was commissioned and filmed as part of EAF 2021. Days 1-6 were commmissioned and filmed in 2024 as part of Bluecoat Liverpools programme. The development of the project is ongoing.