Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure—a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now.
A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century.
The book serves as a guidebook to Lisa Tan’s eponymous video suite. Containing illustrated transcriptions of each video and texts by Mara Lee, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Natasha Sadr Haghighian, and the artist, it both catalogues and responds, sticks to the facts and allows for hearsay.
The concept of the liminal permeates Tan’s videos: drifting between day and night, above and below ground, land and sea. An analogous transit is offered by this book, suspending the reader between the empirical and subjective, with the hope of fulfilling the promise held out by the liminal: transformation.