Haunting Voices: Affective Atmospheres as Transtemporal Contact

In recent decades, the compilation of oral archives of state terrorism has emerged as a critical component of efforts to reconstruct recent traumatic pasts. Prominent examples include the oral history archives in Argentina and Chile. Digital media have become key components in curated spaces dedicated to memory. The recordings have also emerged as a point of departure for artistic interventions and offer testimony to the array of sounds—voices, music, noises—that were heard by prisoners of Latin American concentration camps. This chapter interrogates the role of sound in archives' affective spaces of contact between the present, the past, and the future. The inclusion of affective sound spaces serves as a mode of transtemporal contact that weaves together different temporalities and permits us to view the idea of agency in new light. This is a result of an affective agency that sustains a specific way of experiencing time, violence, trauma, and future possibilities.