Sounding a Speculative Past: Sound of histories as a global resonance

This project article emerges from the research "Anarchivizing Oceanic Margins: Redefining Maritime Museum Narratives," part of the "Global Connectivity in Maritime Perspective" fellowship at the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum Bremerhaven (DSM). Through artistic research and anarchival practices, I reimagine maritime heritage by highlighting silenced and marginalized perspectives in German Maritime collections. Focusing on the models of 19th-century German sailing ships in the DSM collections, this research explores the past, present, and future resonance of the colonial, ecological, and cultural implications of their voyages outside Europe. Using artistic methods of soundscape composition and collective listening, this article reflects on how the sound of histories can be presented through speculative sonotories encounters. I closely analyze the composition process of my own sound piece, as well as the experiences of participants in the collective listening of the same piece, used as a (speculative) provenance research in museum studies. This article explores sonority as a tool for interweaving layers of sound of histories and contemporary resonances, contributing to finding different forms of narrating and curating today’s Maritime museums. keywords: Sonority, Collective Listening, Postcolonialism, German colonialism, Anarchives