The Search for Hassaina’s Song and Other Phonophanies by Suvani Suri

Description

In The Search for Hassaina’s Song and Other Phonophanies, Suvani Suri tunes into the audio archive of the Linguistic Survey of India, a colonial project initiated by Irish linguist George Grierson in early twentieth century South Asia. The act of listening audibilises a trail of sonic histories, voices, memories, and uncanny accounts that emerge from the hisses, crackles, fuzz, and static of the recordings. The narratives get short-circuited across time and location, producing a field of anxieties around language, translation, sounding, and listening.