[Memory] is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. They who seek to approach their own past must conduct themselves like a person digging...They must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images severed from all earlier associations, that stand - like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery - in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.
- Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle
This presentation outlines an ongoing research project and its initial outcomes, stating its rationale and field of reference alongside excerpts of the work, the full version of which can be found here.
A Spectral Geology entails an attempt to listen to sites of contested memory as a methodological antidote to those ways of doing history that promote the superimposition of officially sanctioned narratives atop ignored and complex interminglings of lived experience.
It does so by first considering sound as a phenomenon subject to processes akin to those studied by geologists. Utilizing the metaphor of geology to think through sound allows us to imagine sound accumulating in situ and post-audibly, as a multifarious phantom presence that is variously and continuously subject to stratification, erosion, and mineralization, and ultimately yielding meaningfully to excavation. It also reminds us of the presence of multiple temporal scales of which our lived time and the geologic are but two subsets.
At its outset the proposed methodology is unashamedly speculative. It poses questions that physics would easily dismiss yet allow for valuable considerations on the dominant modes of history telling that we allow to construct our worlds and their possible alternatives.
On initial encounter with the work, you are plunged at random into one of twenty-three sites. You first notice a masked structure, or at least the suggestion of such. Bereft of anything more than a white field, your eye might shift to the background. You search for something that may be considered consequential. A field recording of the site fades up, continuing uninterrupted as you scroll down into the subterranea of the site. In the field recording, you cannot dependably make out the structure. Instead you hear the goings-on in its midst - birds, dogs, machinery, insects, the movement of plants, humans, traffic, wind, pre-recorded music, speech. Am I listening to a single recording? Or is it composed from numerous sources? And is it contemporaneous with the initial photographic image? The only thing that matters here is that both sound and image are spatially coupled by the locus of the monument. The time represented is indistinct, highlighting the slipperiness of the temporal index and echoing Bergson’s insistence (1944: 204-295) that the present contains all pasts.
The masked structure is a spomenik, a mid-twentieth century monument located in what was formerly Yugoslavia. It commemorates events from WWII that were pivotal in the founding of a nation that lasted as a federated republic (of what is now variously Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia) until 1992. It represents an official history of the site, frozen in time and intended only for solemn commemoration.