Non-Human Acoustemology in Recent Sakha Cinema

• In Event: Posthumanism Today: Slavic Politics and Aesthetics of Questioning the Anthropocene

Abstract

The paper discusses sonic aspects of recent Sakha independent films as a counter-acoustemology of decolonized listening. Introduced by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, the concept of acoustemology means sonic knowledge based upon the interplay between humans, environments, materialities, technologies, and non-human forms of life. In several recent Sakha films by Kostas Marsaan, Ayaal Adamov, and Liubov Borisova, the uses of sound and voice facilitate experiences of a continual flux between different languages, natural environments, and ghostly post-Soviet traumaspaces. Instead of mechanically reproducing pre-established binaries of self and world, these films, I argue, affirm the multiplicity of relations between sonic objects. Reconfiguring the human–nonhuman divide on the levels of story and sound design, many recent Sakha films imagine what philosopher Eugene Thacker calls “the world without us,” which is found “in the very fissures, lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth.”

Author

• Evgeniia Eva Ivanilova, U of Pittsburgh