Inaudibilities of the Sonic Museum - Keynote Lecture abstract

In my forthcoming book The Trembling City (MIT Press, 2026), I develop the concept of negative acoustics—an attunement to that which cannot be heard and is impossible to hear—in relation to post-genocidal landscapes marked by disappearance and denial. This talk extends that framework to the sonic museum, asking: what emerges when we listen for missing and disappeared sounds, musics, and sonic cultures? I consider artworks that dwell in the realm of the inaudible: Youmna Saba’s La Réserve des non-dits, which resonates unplayed instruments sealed within a glass tower, offering an archive of their ‘breaths’; South African artist Gabi Motuba’s vocal works, where acts of screaming summon unrepresentable histories of racialised violence; and Satch Hoyt’s expansive project Afro-Sonic Mapping, which ‘unmutes’ instrument and sound collections marked by the colonial and ethnographic ear. I also examine the role of state and institutional violence in a museum of music in Eastern Turkey, designed to further obscure musical cultures already disappeared by genocide. What forms of knowledge and counter-knowledge arise from engaging with museums’ inaudibilities—and how might such knowledges reorient museological, curatorial, and artistic practice?

Where: National Museum of Music, Mafra, Portugal. Room 2.1

When: Sunday 19 October 2025 at 6 pm