Listening against

Theodore Teichman

This is an archive of places, but it is even more an archive of the materiality of listening. This constitutes a larger inquiry and fascination with the listening as performance and the various “instruments” and “scores” that shape or encode this sonic event of the performance of the image. In particular, this project uses this arts-based research approach to engage critically with the concept of "The Transition," which has shaped the geography and imaginary of Ex-Yugoslavia. This is a collection of recordings made and then composed into soundscapes between September 2018 and May 2019 in Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Through these techniques I propose an approach soundscape practices to engage materially the constitutive world of listening and the narration of time-worlds.

On several weekday’s nights in winter, I went to the underpass under all corners of the Terazije square – one of the “hearts” of Belgrade. This space is defined by echo, a counterpoint of sound performing itself. The portals to the world above create a sonic line. It is acousmatic, perceptually detached beyond recognition from the discrete source of the sound. It is just a line. In the underground passage, “the echo displaces the linear relation of origin and horizon, past and future, by prolonging the sound event to a point where it takes over” (LaBelle 2010: 7). Materializing as a strange body, “the echo… [stages] [the passing of sound] as a performance” (LaBelle 2010: 6-7).

Underneath Terazije Square, October - December 2018

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