engleski

Auralities of Bare Life: Searching for Sound in Written Narratives of Women Prisoners of Political Labour Camps on the Islands Grgur and Goli

Moving along the lines of the understanding of listening as a practice that is not "contained and readily available for the historian in one document but instead enmeshed across multiple textualities, often mentioned in passing and subsumed under other apparent purposes" (Ochoa Gautier 2014:7) the author of this presentation tries to provide a sound-focused reading of existing published and recorded testimonies of women prisoners of socialist political labour camps on islands Sveti Grgur and Goli. Preceded by more than forty years of silence, these testimonies started to appear in publications, radio interviews and tv documentaries at the beginning of 1990s. Although understandably not focused explicitly on sound and music, the narratives of women prisoners are replete with references to acoustic dimensions of experience of imprisoned life, instances of (mis)use of music (reproduced or performed) within the everyday regimes of torture, as well as rare occasions in which the sound of/or music appeared as an unexpected and at times misplaced symbol of "normal" life lived beyond the island shores. By offering an "acoustically tuned exploration" of this written archive, the author hopes to contribute to the existing literature on political prison regimes of archipelago Goli, as well as to the growing ethnomusicological studies exploring the nexus of music, sound, politics and torture.

music ; torture ; labour camps ; aurality ; acoustemology

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