The Art of 'Disturbing the Peace': Spectral Politics and Infrastructural Afterlives in the Taiwan Strait
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- R201
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Chris Cristóbal Chan for a talk on the Beishan Broadcast Wall in Kinmen, exploring sound, spectrality, and the afterlives of Cold War infrastructure in the Taiwan Strait.
The Beishan Broadcast Wall in the Kinmen Islands is one of the last remaining semi-operational sonic infrastructures from the Cold War-era that once blasted open-air propaganda across the maritime border in the Taiwan Strait. Focusing on a contemporary artist’s attempt to transform the historically haunted site into a revitalised tourist destination, this talk explores how a sounds and specters merge and overlap within a political condition of spectrality.
Drawing on anthropological ideas of sound infrastructures, specters, and spectrality, this talk argues that aspirations for visibility in the margins of the geopolitically tensions in the Taiwan Strait are in fact intimately tied with the politics of coming to terms of a multiplicity of specters. Paradoxically, the quest for visibility rests upon an aesthetic mobilisation of the invisible within the politics of spectralisation.
About the speaker
Chris Cristóbal Chan is a media anthropologist and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. His research involves imaginations of sovereignty as it is (re)mediated through making art and remaking environments. Through a multi-sited ethnography across various field sites off the coast of China, his research follows a series of seafaring artists who are involved in site-specific work on border islands situated at China’s pelagic peripheries and examines how their mobility and mobilization by the state make manifest a greater concern with living-with or contending with future crisis. The role that artists and the environment play together in crafting culture in crisis becomes a lens through which the contemporary problem of living together in a shared world can be studied as an anthropological question. His research has also been the recipient of the Social Science Research Council International Research Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Fellowship.
