Abstract
Is sound henceforth inseparable from our sense of home? A shifting field of aesthetics and affect, sound has impact on subjectivity, consciousness, relationality, attentiveness, and therefore it has ramifications for ethics and politics.
For the future to be “our home,” it would require capacities that have accompanied us throughout and that we have come to take for granted: “the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future.” (Shoshana Zuboff, 4, 20) Sound, in contexts of conflict has direct impact on these individual and collective possibilities. The right to future is a right to home: “The future is our home too,” writes Shoshana Zuboff (57). Evoking fundamentals necessary to human emancipation, Larissa Sansour’s artwork is preoccupied with a sense of “future” and “home” interrogating its possibility as “mastery, voice, relationship, and sanctuary: part freedom, part flourishing...part refuge, part prospect.” (Zuboff, 5)
Considering the videography of Larissa Sansour, Samira Badran, and Rehab Nazzal, I ask the following questions: What are the present conditions of sound in relation to how a place is lived? How does sound, when it issues from conditions of violence, become a mode of control, depersonalization, dehumanization? Will a regime of urban soundscape in global sites of conflict supersede a “politics of listening” or “the permission to narrate”? How does sound then is marshalled in these artworks to address and withstand a regime of the carceral? Sound, these artworks show, creates a sense of the carceral and of home.
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