Landscapes of Loss: Curatorial Mapping and the Use of Archival Sound Recordings

Abstract

This article explores how sites marked by loss can be activated and represented through sound, curatorship and mapping. We examine this by looking at a recent exhibition, Lingering Absences: Hearing Landscape Through Memory, that is based on the Eoan Group Archive. The Eoan Group was one of the first to produce full-scale opera productions in South Africa, yet their history remained largely unknown to the general public until 2006, when archival records that detailed the history of the group were uncovered. Drawing on this collection of material, and on an oral history project and book publication inspired by the Eoan Group Archive, the Lingering Absences exhibition worked with ideas of dislocation, absence and discomfort as a way of engaging with traumatic pasts, thereby deliberately avoiding a chronological and teleological reproduction of the Eoan Group’s history. Investigating the methodologies that were used to conceptualise and execute the exhibition, this article engages with curatorial sound mapping as a creative research practice through which to explore the intersection of memory, sound, body and place.