In what ways is sound used to shape how contemporary military conflicts are operated, and to what extent is our ability to listen framed by the politics of colonialism? This year’s NEXT Festival symposium brings together Bint Mbareh, Steve Goodman (Kode9), Gascia Ouzounian, Stas Shärifullá (HMOT) and Ján Solčáni to explore through lectures, discussion and workshop how sound can become an instrument of oppression and power.
Gascia Ouzounian will offer a talk (11:10 am) entitled City of Waves: Atmospheric Occupation in Beirut:
This talk traces a shift in colonial occupation and warfare—from early twentieth-century aerial policing, which treated cities as surfaces to be monitored and struck, to occupation of a city’s very air and atmosphere as a means of saturating everyday life with violence. I argue that this shift signals a move toward more insidious forms of violence: the “slow violence of the everyday, the nonevent” (Calvillo).
Drawing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan and the sonic investigation agency Earshot’s Air Pressure project, I propose atmospheric occupation as a way to describe how Beirut’s airs are persistently unsettled as part of a political project designed to engineer disorder. In dialogue with the work of artists and writers including Rayya Badran, Nadim Mishlawi, and Mhamad Safa, I extend this inquiry to sonic residues: lingering sounds and vibrations that accumulate as a kind of sonic weather, shaping affective and political climates. I analyse these residues through a “dark meteorology” of sound attuned to perturbations and disturbances that endure.
Finally, I chart a broader shift in urban imaginaries—from the classical city-as-grid to the contemporary city-as-field, an indeterminate zone of intra-acting forces. I argue that governments and militaries increasingly conceptualise cities as assemblages of waves, signals, and flows that can be manipulated or disrupted for political and military ends, and that wave mechanics—turbulencing, pressurising, radiating harm—are mobilised to enact forms of violence that slip beneath sensory thresholds while unfolding across spatial and geological scales.
At 13:55, she will participate in a Panel Discussion w/ Steve Goodman, Stas Shärifullá, Bint Mbareh + Audience Q&A. Moderated by Ján Solčáni