The Smooth and the Striated: An exercise in micro-publishing writings on listenings

This article examines the production, concept and realization of the author’s recent artist book The Smooth and the Striated (2022) which documents the process of listening whilst in the field. Intertwining affective realizations with fragments of the theoretical discourse on the listening subject and landscape, the work was produced in response to a single day of fieldwork undertaken at the Monument to the Battle for the Wounded, a post-Second World War monument in central Bosnia and Herzegovina which was partially destroyed following the Bosnian War of 1992–95. The fieldwork, consisting of audio field recording, photography and writing, took place as part of the artist’s wider project to investigate the problematics of the former Yugoslavia through its memorial heritage, but to do so by means of a speculative methodology that imagines sound as an infinitely fine but persistent presence. The artist book was completed as part of a residency at Footnote Centre for Image and Text in Belgrade, Serbia, and printed in collaboration with the DIY/not-for-profit printing house Praksa Kvaka in Belgrade. The publication’s title references Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of space in which geographies are characterized as overlaid with the imprints of power and/or resistance. This reference is echoed in the photographic reproductions of patina and the erosion of concrete forms throughout the book, together with the physical object of the work – the dense, black risograph printing process leaves a residue of its disintegration on the hands of the reader and as such the reader cannot help but be inculcated in the book’s physical presence, as well as an attempt at countering the monument’s verticality by being bound horizontally.