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London based artist Farina Graham has established an ongoing documentary project which showcases the lives of a fishing community in southern Pakistan since 2001. In "Mubarak", the filmed and photographic material is directed through collaboration with the villagers and the artist charting a day in the life of Riaz, the central character. The images follow an imaginary sequence of events to introduce the idea of a narrative –about expectation, longing, desire. The physical expanse of the arid Sindh coastal desert is the background for the youth to play out their day. The film ends without resolution calling on the viewer’s personal interpretation. Farina Graham invited artist Mikhail Karikis in spring 2003 to respond to the documentary footage, accumulated over two a period of two year, through the formal structure of sound.
The music composed by Mikhail Karikis is heard for the entire duration of the film "Mubarak". Since there is no dialogue, the film score is designed to function as a story-telling device. A monotonous drone produced by an Indian harmonium is dramatically interrupted by amplified sounds of inhalations, whispers, rhymes, prayers and clapping games whenever the character gazes at the landscape. These are the sounds he hears in the empty, silent horizon of the desert, where he deposited the fantasies and dreams of his fruitful imagination as a child. The desert and the sea transform into conceptual spaces where the character creates his own soundtrack. The conclusion of the music is composed in the traditional 9/8; this throbbing, decisive beat is composed entirely from unsuccessful attempts to verbalise and form syllables.
