Spectral Geologies

If imagined as an enduring, cumulative presence, sound would seem to contribute to a vast terrestrial archive in which all pasts remain within the present. The research investigates how this approach suggests new possibilities for framing histories of place that offer unofficial, social, and multi-vocal histories counter to official and top-down narratives. 

The research positions monument sites as the loci of these investigations, contending with the tension that arises between the quotidian and the authorised that arise by way of contemporary incursions into the memorial space of the former Yugoslavia and how these monuments to the events of World War II bear witness to the contemporary – the European migrant crisis, the battle over toponyms, and foreign extractivist annexation, for instance – in post-utopian contexts. 

Current works include a large-scale, multi-space audio and sculptural installation working in concert with moving image, text and photography which transposes the spatial and temporal lines of interrelation that radiate out from a monument site on the border between the European Union and non-EU Europe into a single, dense constellation, and in doing so attempts to fathom how a former bastion of anti-fascist resistance is inculcated in the daily tragedies of the Balkan asylum-seeker route. 

Previous works from the project have employed multi-channel video, sculpture, works on paper and artist books. The practice relies heavily on fieldwork and archival access in the republics of the former Yugoslavia, with a particular focus on Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Serbia. The problematic notions of ‘field’, ‘fieldworker’ and ‘landscape’ have also emerged as sub-themes in the research.

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