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An Archaeology of Sound: A Slightly Curving Place Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2021

NIDA GHOUSE
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Abstract

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he began measuring the acoustic properties of a premodern performance space in the mid-1990s, and has been building ambisonic microphones since the early 2000s in order to carry out his project in further locations. Bringing together writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound designers, A Slightly Curving Place is an exhibition that responds to Umashankar's practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Umashankar asserts that we cannot just look for theatres in landscapes of the past; we must listen for them. In this dossier, contributors to the exhibition extend the notion of listening to an archaeological site to include practices of listening to text, textures, technologies, the body and the fields of recording.

Type
Article
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 209 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2021

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References

Notes

1 For an introduction to the field see publications such as Scarre, Chris and Lawson, Graeme, eds., Archaeoacoustics (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006)Google Scholar and Linda C. Eneix, ed., Archaeoacoustics: The Archaeology of Sound. Publication Proceedings from the 2014 Conference in Malta (Osprey, Florida: The OTS Foundation, 2014).

2 For the website of this exhibition see www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2020/a_slightly_curving_place/start.php, accessed 7 May 2021.

3 The exhibition was realized in collaboration with and with contributions by Umashankar Manthravadi, Archive Books, Bani Abidi, Mojisola Adebayo, Vinit Agarwal, Keramat Ali, Christine Andersen, Sukhesh Arora, Anurima Banerji, Lilia Di Bella, Moushumi Bhowmik, Lal Miah Boyati, Madhuri Chattopadyay, Padmini Chettur, Arunima Chowdhury, Emese Csornai, Padma Damodaran, Gernot Ernst, Hugo Esquinca, Jenifer Evans, Chiara Figone, Eunice Fong, Tyler Friedman, Janardan Ghosh, Nida Ghouse, Brooke Holmes, Alexander Keefe, Sukanta Majumdar, Gaia Martino, Robert Millis, Daniel M. Neuman, Nirmalendu Mitra Thakur, Nityananda Mitra Thakur, Sachchidananda Mitra Thakur, Farah Mulla, Rita Sonal Panjatan, Ayaz Pasha, T. J. Rehmi, RENU, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Katie Ryan, Sara, Yashas Shetty, The Travelling Archive, Maarten Visser, Susanne Wagner, Oliver Weeks and others.

4 Contributors to the Coming to Know programme included Vinit Agarwal, Anurima Banerji, Moushumi Bhowmik, Padmini Chettur, Nida Ghouse, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Brooke Holmes, Alexander Keefe, Umashankar Manthravadi, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Regina Sarreiter, Vanessa Stovall, Phiroze Vasunia, Maarten Visser and Annette Wilke. For further details of the programme see www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2020/a_slightly_curving_place/a_slightly_curving_place_digitales_diskursprogramm/termine.php, accessed 7 May 2021.

5 To view archived materials from the programme see the following links: digging: www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_171123.php; recording: www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_171187.php; tuning: www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_171251.php, accessed 7 May 2021.

6 Participants in the first workshop at HKW included Vinit Agarwal, Haig Aivazian, Nicholas Bussman, Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Mathhias Haenisch, Brandon LaBelle, Umashankar Manthravadi, Tisha Mukherjee and others. Participants in the second workshop hosted by the Postclassicisms Network included Vinit Agarwal, Anurima Banerji, Frances Bernstein, Joshua Billings, Malina Buturovic, Caroline Cheung, Katie Dennis, Paul Eberwine, Tyler Friedman, Nida Ghouse, Brooke Holmes, Pria Jackson, Alexander Keefe, Sherry Lee, Sophie Lewis, Mark Payne, Gavin Steingo, Bora Yoon and Mantha Zarmakoupi.

7 For details of the publications see www.archivebooks.org/forthcoming, accessed 7 May 2021.