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SIM Research Colloquium: The Archive and the Aural City
Event date: 06/23/2026
Location: SIM seminar room, 3 p.m.
A book talk with Alejandro L. Madrid (Harvard University) and Veit Erlmann (University of Texas at Austin)
In *TheArchive and the Aural City*, Alejandro L. Madrid examines the politics of sound archives in relation to the sonic turn in the humanities. The advent of the sonic turn in the humanities advocates for listening and sound culture as means of re-evaluating dominant visual-centric and logocentric epistemes. This book proposes the concept of the Aural City to examine how the Latin American elites who coalesced around the idea of the Lettered City continue to hold cultural and political significance at the start of the twenty-first century, whilst also exploring how this concept might challenge the shortcomings of this elite’s nationalistic agenda in order to build more inclusive spaces for intellectual exchange and political mobilisation. By focusing on a number of institutional and alternative archival projects connected to the Aural City, the book investigates how these spaces may reproduce older nation-building projects, but also how they could help us imagine their post-national potential and the possibility of retrieving lo inaudito, what these archives render unheard. The book seeks to expand the notion of what an archive can be in order to challenge the boundary between public and private spaces and knowledge implied in conventional conceptualisations of the archive.
Start 3 p.m.
Duration 60 minutes
Free admission
The event is open to the public. No registration is required.
Access to the seminar room via the gate of the State Institute for Music Research. Link to OpenStreetMap
Related Links
- Alejandro L. Madrid, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music, Harvard University
- SIM Research Colloquium
Photo by Marina Madrid-Pirozhenko