Listening Through Breakdown
During the 1980s and 1990s, Peru experienced the most violent period in its republican history. Amid political violence, media control, territorial fragmentation, and fragile communication channels, infrastructure became a key site of struggle between insurgent groups and state forces. Blackouts, bombings, radio sabotage, curfews, and transmission failures became signs of threat, and of shifting control and contested authority, altering what civilians could hear and know in everyday life.
The project asks how disruptions to electricity, radio, and telecommunications reshaped the auditory and social conditions through which danger became perceptible, inferable, and communicable. Drawing on press and human rights archives, emergency regulations, and contextual interviews, it traces infrastructural disruption across Lima, Ayacucho, and Puno, comparing the distinct media ecologies of these regions. It argues that listening can be understood as an inferential practice for navigating semantic uncertainty, assessing threat, and making sense of shifting forms of vulnerability and control.
Photo credits: Lugar de la Memoria
Precarious Listening is a project developed with the support of the World Listening Project, that explores experiences of listening shaped by work. It focuses on sounds that may be fleeting for customers, visitors, or audiences, but become a constant presence for those who work in these environments: alarms, machines, background music, announcements, engines, voices, and other forms of unchosen listening that accumulate in the body and structure time and attention.
The project takes the form of a framing text, an open call, a collective archive, and a radio broadcast. Through recordings, voice notes, auditory memories, and workers’ accounts, Precarious Listening gathers everyday traces of situations in which listening ceases to be a choice and becomes exposure, obligation, endurance, or even survival.
Talks & Conferences
"How to live together in sound" Symposium - Helsinki Music Centre, Black Box Concert Hall (forthcoming)
“Crafting Worlds Through Archival Sampling Practices” in Sonic Worldings Doctoral Conference | Orpheus Institute, Ghent.
“Acoustic Ecologies of the Guarding Ear” in Sound in Museums Conference | Mafra, Portugal.
“Poéticas de la degradación sonora” in Copiar Copias Congress | PUCP Lima.
“Sampling and Sonic Fiction”: Transferencias Aurales Symposium | Mexico City.
“Sound recycling: (aesth)ethics of sampling” Performative Talk: Field Notes, Time to Listen Series | Akadmie der Künste Berlin.