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Guest speaker: Brandon LaBelle
Following last September’s catastrophic floods in the Pelio and Thessaly regions the 3rd International Workshop in Theory and Sound explores ideas defining water’s agential matter, such as flow, overflow, debris, leakage, torrent, inundation, tidal waves and tectonics, ruination, cataclysm, mud, mold, dripping, pollution, among others, along with their political/ecological resonances in sound. The “Daniel” and “Elias” storms foregrounded processes of neoliberal water politics and eco-governmentality variously regulating sensibilities of “nature”, the “state”, the “citizen” and their interfaces, sensibilities promoting a future-oriented agenda for nature’s domestication and market-oriented hydrospheric “development”. At the same time, their eventful auralities drew our attention to water’s “unknowability” (Neimanis 2017) and “inter-agentivity” (Ingold) as well as to water as a “hyperobject” (Morton 2013), powerful enough to disorder, rupture, dissolve, probe the limits of, even undo, human and more-than-human lives, rebooting the way we reason the world we now live in. How can we make sense of such sonic hydrologics and their “spacetimematterings” (Barad 2007) along with their vocabularies of deviance, impossibility, excess, loss and resilience? In what ways do they reforge the geographies, transform the landscape, the lived modalities, the phantasmatic assemblages and the strategies of its dwelling? In what ways do they give voice to the question of what it means to dwell? How might diverse terrains of livelihood and their ongoing “reconfigurings” (Barad ibid.) witness, archive, become attuned to, texture and perform memories of the aquatic disaster, with its human and more-than-human catastrophes, vulnerabilities, struggles and healings and their far-reaching ec(h)opolitical implications and diffractions? These and similar questions are entangled with the ΙSTW’s firm orientation towards the critical revisiting and un-learning of the “Mediterranean” sound archive and its diverse - (post)colonial, imperial and nationalist - ontologies and knowledge economies. |
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