Avantika Seth is an oral historian, documentary storyteller and curator building moving archives across the Global South. Her practice explores family memory, silence, migration, care and the ways personal histories live within bodies, homes and material objects. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University, where she created Will You Remember What I Choose to Forget?, an award-winning documentary film and installation tracing intergenerational memory, silences and the performance of care through her family home in Shimla, a hill town in northern India.
Working across oral history, film, exhibitions, community archives and listening-based workshops, Avantika is committed to relational, collaborative and non-extractive forms of storytelling. Her projects have taken shape across India, Indonesia and the United States, in collaboration with families, communities, universities, humanitarian organisations and cultural institutions.
A central part of her practice is making oral history more accessible. She trains local communities to record, interpret and share their own histories, strengthening their agency over how their experiences are represented, preserved and circulated. She also brings oral history into conversation with various fields including journalism, healthcare and the development sector.
Avantika specialises in “listening to the otherwise,” a practice of listening beyond words and attending to silences, gestures, emotions, relationships and the conditions within which a story is shared. Through workshops and long-term collaborations, she helps students, journalists, nonprofit teams, hospital staff, caregivers and community practitioners use oral history methods to listen more deeply and engage with people’s narratives ethically. Her work considers how different fields can benefit from forms of listening that are slower, more attentive and more responsive to the people whose histories are being held.
Currently based in Goa, on India’s southwestern coast, Avantika is developing an independent practice that allows archives to travel, interact and gather new meanings while remaining intimate with their origin stories and with the people, places and communities that continue to hold them.
