"The Cave Mouth: Listening To Sound and Voice in Okinawan War Memory"

This book chapter, a collaboration with anthropologist Rupert Cox, derives its impetus from our work "The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice." The art work was originally shown in installation form at the "Staging Disorder" exhibition (2015) but has since travelled as a film to festivals and conferences such as “Ways of Dwelling,” SIEF, Gottingen, Germany (2017); Inter #7, Glasgow (2016); "Sound Studies, Art, Experience, Politics”, CRASSH, Cambridge University and "Symbiotic Anthropologies", Association of Social Anthropologists Annual Conference, University of Exeter (both 2015).

The art work deploys sound composed from recordings captured in a subterranean space on the island of Okinawa (Japan) alongside a screen which relays visually words of memory from a civilian survivor of the 1945 Battle of Okinawa that were spoken to us in that same underground location. The chapter takes the art work as its focus, accounting analytically for the original fieldwork, subsequent composition and editing and design of the installation before contextualising these in terms of the island's history of conflict, sound's sensorial relation to memory, sound's affective relationship to reverberation and echo and trauma's investigation and representation through other modes than the exclusively diagnostic / clinical.

• https://vimeo.com/124139457