D.A.Calf
A Spectral Geology is the initial outcome of a continuing investigation into new conceptions of the relationships between sound, historical agency, memory and time.
Treating sound as a geological phenomenon creates speculative possibilities for hearing the past in new ways. These can act to counter the narrative-based, top-down and officially condoned tellings of history. Like other geological phenomena, sound can lay dormant in a sedimentary and stratified site. It can erode, petrify and dissolve. It can be excavated, and with it traces of past agency.
In this first instalment of the project, such a paradigmatic approach has been applied to a series of sites in the former Yugoslav republics of the Western Balkans. These sites have been variously subjected to material decay, contestation, commemoration, forgetting, erasure, destruction and revision. Regardless of any official claims on the sites, they are dynamic living places imprinted with continual agency, both human and non-human, on a daily basis. The work invites viewers to consider these sites as if the sounds of the past always remain audible, regardless of voice. Textual and photographic materials act as prompts for this process, important in both what they exclude and include while simultaneously highlighting the arbitrary nature of many dominant and received readings of sites.
N.B. Best experienced on desktop browser in fullscreen mode, using headphones.
A Spectral Geology, 2020
[excerpt]
Sound, text, photography in an online archive consisting of twenty-three vitrines.
aspectralgeology.info