Reworking the archival estate of the Turkish-born poet Semra Ertan, who has lived in West Germany as a so-called “guest laborer” from 1971 until her death by self-immolation in 1982, Cana Bilir-Meier’s film Semra Ertan (2013) pursues representational concerns via material means: in particular, via the materialities of sound cuts and tape hiss. This article brings Bilir-Meier’s sound work in dialogue with Tina M. Campt’s “listening to images” (2017) and Salomé Voegelin’s “sonic methodologies of sound” (2021) in order to develop a sonic method that accounts for the situatedness of historically and socially differently positioned listening subjects.
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