Videogram 140: Gascia Ouzounian [online/english]

Join us for a talk in the Videogram lecture series on contemporary curatorial and artistic practice and theory.

Death Cities: Hearing Atmospheric and Spatial Violence

This talk explores atmospheric violence—violence that is pervasive, diffuse, immanent, ‘in the air’—and spatial violence, what Herscher and Siddiqi (2014) have described as ‘the manifold forms of harm mediated through built environments,’ focusing on the role of sound and listening in violence ‘becoming atmospheric’ in cities (Peterson 2021). It references earwitness testimonies, citizen journalism, and clandestine investigations pertaining to the 51-Day War in Gaza in 2014 and contemporary Beirut in exploring how cities become sites of atmospheric and spatial violence, and how this violence is heard by those who are subjected to it. How is the listening subject reconfigured when their primary apprehension of the crumbling world around them is through sensing vibrations, including through the coupling of their body with the violent shaking of buildings? How do sound and listening participate in the spatial violence that characterizes urbicide? And what strategies have artists and activists developed to make audible forms of atmospheric violence that otherwise go undetected and unnoticed today?

Gascia Ouzounian is a sonic theorist and practitioner whose work explores sound in relation to space, urbanism, and violence. She is the author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press 2021) and the forthcoming The Trembling City, which investigates cities as in relation to sound and vibrational force, particularly in the contexts of war, genocide, and mass violence. Ouzounian leads the project Sonorous Cities at the University of Oxford, where she is associate professor of music. She hosts the conversation series Countersonics: Radical Sonic Imaginaries, which asks how sonic practices can operate as modes of resistance and repair in times of conflict and crisis. Her work has featured at Mosaic Rooms, daadgalerie, SAVVY Contemporary, Akademie der Künste, Sursock Museum, Goethe Institute, OSCILLATIONS Festival, and Café OTO, among others.

The lecture in English will take place online. Meeting ID: 994 3962 0135.