Spectral Geology

Written media release:
What happens when we listen to a space with which we have previous experience, and one separated in time? How
can we think of the experience elicited through this process as being precipitated by sounds laying dormant in a site?
In the three-channel video installation Spectres I, a couple recall their childhood recollections of a series of
monuments forged at the time to bolster the narrative of a new nation, but which have since been challenged.
Relating memories separated in both time and space, and focusing on the remembered sounds of these sites, the
work investigates the slippage of time and memory, through temporal and spatial transposition. The speakers, like the
monuments, are always off-screen. Only the wider monument sites are visible – where they merge with the
landscape, are co-opted by other agencies, and where their intended purposes become problematic or ignored.
This work is accompanied by A Sound within the earth of its own making – a series of sculptural forms
representating of the sound of a series of monument sites cast in the materials used to construct the corresponding
monument. Derived from three-dimensional audio spectrograms of field recordings made at the sites, the sculptures
give mineral form to the intangibility and transience of sound, whilst suggesting that sound can be subject to
geological forces.
Brief Biography of Artist(s)
D A Calf is a sound and installation artist, field recordist and researcher, based between Melbourne, Australia and
the Western Balkans, working predominantly with sound and the act of listening to explore the monumentalist impulse
and archives of place, whether they be speculative, hidden, contested, or otherwise. His current research focuses on
four monument sites in the former Yugoslavia and the contemporary issues – asylum-seeker routes, extractivism,
neo-colonialism and the liminality of unsettled borders – that impinge upon and reterritorialise them. Calf has
exhibited work in Europe, South America and Australia, as well as presenting research at numerous international
conferences and in academic journals dedicated to sound studies, archival practice, and experimental publication. He
is a current PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne.