Biami - Tidikawa and Friends

Brief description

Jeff Doring is an artist, photographer and filmmaker who produced a documentary film “Tidikawa and Friends” about the daily lives of the Bedamini speakers of the Nomad region of Western Province of Papua New Guinea. This collection was created to document the audio and sounds of his recordings in the film where it captures the spirit medium Tidakawa who communicates with ancestoral spirits. The fieldwork was undertaken in 1971 with field notes on the Bendamini and the sounds and audio in this collection are part of the film that offers a visual exploration to the Spirit World of Tidikawa. There were about 3,800 Bedamini speakers on the Great Papuan Plateau in 1972 living in 60 longhouse communities scattered throughout 700 square kilometres of tropical rainforest. A longhouse community consisted of 20-100 individuals and their sites shifts three to four years to allow for new gardens for their subsistence livelihoods. In 1969, Jeff made recordings of the Kor Wop ceremony in Mt Hagen, Western Highlands.