Visiting Speaker - Professor Laudan Nooshin

In her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi powerfully evokes the image of a sound preserved like a dried flower between the pages of a book. This is not just any sound, however, but the more-than-sounds of sirens, bombs and other sonic experiences during the missile strikes on Tehran in the later stages of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Nafisi’s account speaks both to the profound entanglement of sound, affect, and memory, and to the intense somatic materiality of sound experienced through the entire body. This paper will draw on current research on the sounds of Tehran to explore this entanglement and in particular the palimpsestic nature of historical soundspaces with their layered sonic archaeology. Where do such sounds go and might it be possible to discover their reverberations today, rather like the primordial cosmic aftereffects of the ‘big bang’? How do we understand sound’s materiality as it enters spaces, bodies, buildings—impacting, shaping and changing them? And what does it mean to listen to historical spaces where people have experienced violence and trauma due to war and other acts of aggression? I focus on two case studies: Tehran’s Qasr Museum, and Sayyareh, an app-based soundwalk through which the streets of Tehran are reimagined. In both cases, sound offers an important lens through which to explore how such spaces are remembered and memoralised, and their role in the national sonic and affective imaginary.