A Spectral Geology is the initial outcome of a continuing investigation into the relationship between sound, memory, historical agency and time. Treating sound as a geological phenomenon creates speculative possibilities for hearing the past in new ways that can act to counter the narrative-based, official tellings of history. Like other geological phenomena, sound can lay dormant, sedimentary and stratified in a site. It can erode, petrify and dissolve. It can be excavated, and with it traces of past agency.

In this first instalment of the project, this paradigmatic approach has been applied to a series of contested sites in the former Yugoslav republics of the Western Balkans. These sites have been variously subjected to material decay, commemoration, forgetting, erasure, destruction and revision. Regardless of any official claims on the sites, they are living, dynamic places, imprinted with renewed agency, both human and non-human, on a daily basis. The work invites the audience to consider these sites as if the sounds of the past always remain audible, regardless of voice. Textual and photographic materials act as prompts for this process whilst simultaneously highlighting the arbitrary nature of many dominant and received readings of sites.