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Contribution short abstract:

How do we leave experiences, standings, encounters, and representations in their own right as fragmented, unruly, fleeting? What is left out or gained by emphasizing the narrative of an encounter over the location? Speculative thoughts on letting go of excessive naming.

Contribution long abstract:

How do we leave experiences, standings, encounters, and representations in their own right as fragmented, unruly, fleeting? This paper is both a reflection and a question, a work-in-progress, and an imagination of what will take place in the field. It starts with space, an encounter, and a recording. By reflecting on experiences already taken place, and those that will come in the months before the conference, I question the necessity of identifying or placing recollection, encounter, and recording in a particular place. Instead, we could explore the possibility of not naming, not identifying, not expanding.

What is left out or gained by emphasizing the narrative of an encounter over the location? What does it mean to anonymize, hide, or murk the location of an image and how can we make use of the practices involved in noticing, without essentializing the encounter in location, address, or country.

From a methodological perspective, this paper makes an argument for thinking through fragments with sound, both heard and recorded, emitted and omitted, not as oppositions, but as fragments of an event. Through this, I expand on the nature of fragmentation and the lack of identification through a collaborative angle on the use of sound (recording). Where sound inevitably helps to identify, there is also space for play and experimentation, and maybe even confusing the sounds of places and narratives. What emerges, then - and remains, is not less than, but an encounter.