About

The Residency: Artists Immersed in Culture and Landscape

The Karoonjhar Intangible Heritage Digital Database

An Offering of Presence and Preservation

Nestled in the ancient embrace of the Karoonjhar Mountains — a range formed over 3.5 billion years ago — Echoes of Karoonjhar is a collective artistic response to a place where stone holds song, and the wind carries the whispers of countless generations.

Conceived by Lahooti, with the support of the British Council and in collaboration with Invisible Flock, this residency brought together a constellation of artists from across Pakistan. Musicians, poets, visual storytellers, and filmmakers gathered at the Lahooti Karoonjhar Commune in Nagarparkar, where they lived, listened, and created — not merely observing the landscape, but moving with it.

Here, art was grown from the soil of shared experience.

At the heart of this initiative is a living, breathing digital archive — the Karoonjhar Intangible Heritage Digital Database. It is an ever-expanding space of memory and meaning, woven with the creative offerings of the residency. This publicly accessible archive becomes both vessel and voice for the region’s cultural wealth, featuring:

Folk music and ancestral compositions
Oral histories, passed down by memory, not manuscript
Rituals and spiritual practices rooted in land and lineage
Indigenous knowledge systems, ecological and sacred
Artistic interpretations, created in response to place

(Categories and featured work will continue to grow as the archive deepens.

Echoes of Karoonjhar is not just a residency — it is a return. A return to story, to listening, to witnessing what is often overlooked. It is a quiet act of resistance against forgetting. Under the guidance of Lahooti, this project honors the intangible — the felt, the heard, the remembered — through creative process and deep-rooted care.

What emerged is now here — held within this archive — so others, too, may encounter Karoonjhar not as a place on a map, but as a presence. A spirit. A song still echoing.