Frequencies of Displacement: Sonic-Cinematic Meditations in the Anthropocene

We Were Living a Perpetual Cinematic Moment

Last night, I attended a musical performance titled Frequencies of Displacement, curated by my colleague and friend, Behrooz Moosavi, as part of a newly initiated project called Taqato. The term Taqato derives from Persian, signifying “the point where lines meet” or “intersection”—an apt metaphor for the philosophical and experiential convergence that this analysis seeks to explore. This initiative was launched by Tehran Contemporary Sounds, a Berlin-based platform dedicated to showcasing Iranian contemporary and experimental art and music, thereby creating a transnational space where cultural memory and artistic innovation intersect.

The final performance featured Shahin Entezami, an artist whose work I have followed with considerable interest for several years. My initial encounter with his artistic expression occurred during the Tehran Contemporary Sounds event, where he performed under the moniker Temp-Illusion, a duo comprising Entezami and Behrang Najafi. That performance represented a pristine and energetically sophisticated dance project, intricately weaving concepts of corporeality—body, corpus, and carcass—and engaging the audience deeply within the spatial dynamics, creating what one might describe as an “affective ecology.”

The subsequent year, in 2024, I witnessed Shahin performing solo under his stage name, Tegh. This performance marked a significant aesthetic and experiential shift; it was the first time I was profoundly affected by his sonic architecture. I was struck by how a single artist could transcend the limits of physical form, embracing the invisible, the emotional, and the abstract capacities of sonic art.

Last night’s performance was revelatory, prompting an intellectual desire to encapsulate and preserve the experience. As one listener (this writer) recalls, the opening silence was pregnant with expectation—time seemed suspended—until a low drone snapped the present into relief. In that moment, I felt the durée of the room: layers of past and future compressed into an embodied now. It was as if Gilles Deleuze’s time-image had been summoned by sound, creating “a field of tension and intensities” that evoked the cinematic itself, though no image was projected. This essay treats the performance as a philosophical event—a cinema of the ear—and examines how it stages memory, loss, and futurity through sound, articulating a poetics of haunting, duration, and ecological anxiety in the Anthropocene.

The Sonic-Cinematic Encounter

To frame a sound performance as a cinematic experience may seem paradoxical, but Deleuze and Guattari’s film-philosophy provides a compelling interpretive key. Deleuze (following Bergson) distinguishes two regimes of the cinematic image: the movement-image, tied to sensory-motor habits and linear causality, and the time-image, which emerges when time itself is liberated, capable of “escaping, ungrounding, disrupting” the sensory-motor chain. In Frequencies of Displacement, the music frequently inhabits this time-image mode. Lengthy drones, silences between notes, and the unpredictable interplay of electronics and voice defied narrative logic. Instead, each sound unfolded as a “wave of time,” textured with delay and feedback. Cinematic rhythm resided not in cuts but in the internal movement of the shot itself—“time within the frame” that becomes “a pointer to infinity.” Analogously, the sustained tones in the performance framed time as elastic: one’s attention drifted within each note’s decay, so that the moment of sounding seemed to open onto something beyond.

In the dark concert hall, I felt my bodily senses merge with the acoustics. The rhythmic pulses and microtonal textures encouraged a kind of synaesthetic listening: sound waves rippled through my body like waves of water (a classic Tarkovskian motif), and textures of noise evoked imaginary landscapes. This bodily immersion reflects the fact that film (and by extension any audiovisual encounter) suspends ordinary communication and opens us to “processes of transformation” by engaging forces beyond rational control. Art can disrupt habitual modes of perception and open new modes of being—a radical “care for mental ecologies” that parallels concern for the planetary environment.

In these ways, the concert functioned cinematically even without visual images. The live mixing of field recordings and electronic layers felt like a montage of invisible images: each sound evoked a phantom image in the mind (birdsong suggesting landscapes, voices implying unseen presences). All cinema, even movement-image films, “captures, expresses, and engenders memory and thought.” Here, purely auditory stimuli seemed to activate involuntary memory (mémoire involontaire) in a Bergsonian fashion. Henri Bergson famously defined duration as a present “pregnant with the past,” analogous to a film frame coming alive in motion.

Spectral Memory and the Archive

Memory in this performance was neither linear nor reductive but layered and spectral. Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology captures this condition: he describes a present haunted by “returning” spectres from the past, fracturing traditional temporality. Listening, one sensed ghosts crossing thresholds: whispers and drones that seemed to emanate from lost places or unheard narratives. As Derrida writes, ghosts “arrive from the past and appear in the present” but belong to neither; similarly, each sound brought forth a memory that was at once intimate and alien, both personal and collective.

Bergson’s theory of memory also explains this effect. As David Neo notes regarding Alexander Sokurov’s Mother and Son, Bergson “reduces all matter to an aggregate of ‘images’” and distinguishes two modes of memory—one of habit and one of pure recollection. It is the latter (pure memory) that permeated the concert. These were not mnemonic melodies or recognisable songs, but abstract textures that triggered “mini-Mandelbrots” of recall. Neo argues that Sokurov’s images function like fractals: each memory-image recurs and multiplies, evolving in our psyche and shaping identity. In the performance, a single tone or percussion hit would resonate and decay in waves, interacting with the residual impressions of earlier sounds. That interplay felt like a fractal memory process: layers of sound echoed and transformed each other, much as Neo describes memory-images in Mother and Son. In particular, the program’s echoing drone motifs and loops seemed to repeat and reconfigure themselves organically. This fractal quality corresponds to Bergson’s insight that in duration, no moment is ever truly lost; “consciousness is…ever frugal, so nothing is ‘lost.’” When a field recording (or so I believed) was woven into the soundscape, it lingered in the ear like a trace, pregnant with context — a suggestion of a place beyond the hall. The experience became archival: the audience crouched in sound was akin to viewers in a museum of the past or a ruin, where memories “linger and reappear” uncertainly. Derrida’s notion of the archive—an inaccessible storehouse of the past—seems apt here. The performance itself felt like an oral archive of diasporic existence, with sonic snippets that resist complete control. In this way, Frequencies of Displacement enact Derrida’s paradoxical temporality of the ghost: what appears to return is also forever deferred, an “always-already absent present.”

Cinema as Mourning-Technology

Another dimension of this event was affective mourning—a melancholic awareness of loss and absence that both sound art and cinema often process. In the post-digital age, many filmmakers have treated cinema itself as a mourning technology, a means to keep lost worlds alive. Behrooz Moosavi’s curation invited this sensibility. In the festival’s title, I sensed a nod to the idea that displacement is the ultimate wound: a diaspora performance becomes a séance for displaced souls.

This cinematic mourning has deep precedents. Jean-Luc Godard’s late Histoire(s) du cinéma collage repeatedly layers archive footage to evoke war, empire, and spectral futures, insisting that history’s horrors are “so that history will not forget.” Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, in films such as Hiroshima mon amour, treat memory and silence as cinematic actants: the voice-over whispers are almost a cry for the deceased, and the camera’s gaze on relics (vitrines, landscapes) becomes a form of elegy. Alexander Sokurov’s entire oeuvre exemplifies cinema as elegy: his films (from Mother and Son to Russian Ark) are described as “equally mournful and passionate, intellectual and sensual,” entering into dialogue with “the past, the present, and the future.” For Sokurov, history and personal memory fold together; time is “abolished” or “transfigured” in long takes that dissolve fiction into dreamlike reverie.

In Frequencies of Displacement, moments of auditory stillness functioned similarly. At times, the music fell silent except for distant echoes; in those voids, my own breath became audible. This is reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, where silence and ambient noise (a child’s cry, a creaking wooden floor) stand in for the unsayable memories of a lost childhood. The concert’s use of silence was not empty: it mourned what was unsaid and untouchable. In that suspended instant, I felt something like Derrida’s “death of the other”—a moment where memory and mourning collapse, and the line between presence and absence blurs.

A more political mourning thread was also present. Certain elements recalled Iranian and Lebanese upheavals, personalising global tragedy. Thus, the performance enacted a form of “global melancholia,” like Harun Farocki’s artful documentaries do for current events.

In my own recollection, a fragment of traumatic memory seized the air briefly and then dissipated, summoning without naming the horrors that might lie behind it. This is cinema’s promise as well as its gambit: to give shape to grief that defies representation. Godard’s montage in Notre Musique (2004) reminds us that film (and by analogy, live sound) can be a space of ethical reflection—but it cannot resolve guilt or loss, only keep them alive as questions in our sensory experience.

Anthropocene and Ecosophical Listening

The performance’s conceptual frame also gestured toward the ecological and geopolitical displacements of the Anthropocene. Guattari’s ecosophy—the interwoven mental, social, and environmental ecologies—offers a powerful interpretive lens. For Guattari, art belongs among the “three ecologies” as a way to reorient subjectivity. He argues that cinema and music are “incorporeal species” capable of reframing our perception of nonhuman forces. Listening closely to the Frequencies of Displacement, one realises that the performers were attuning us to displaced ecologies.

Guattari wrote that facing the ecological crisis requires attention to the “experiential regime” of subjectivity as well as external action. The concert did just that: it invited an “experimental care” for our inner ecologies.

A Ghost from Tehran

During the performance, three notable phenomenological occurrences transpired that illuminated the intersection of memory, temporality, and presence:

First, I experienced an involuntary mnemonic resurrection—recalling a high school classmate from Haft-e-Tir High School in Tehran, a boys’ school I attended in my youth. This individual bore a striking physiognomic resemblance to Shahin. Though we never directly interacted, I vividly recall observing him in the sun-drenched schoolyard, traversing the collective space. Tonight, it felt as though this person had reappeared, resurrected in the form of what Derrida might term a “spectre” or “ghost”—a manifestation of what Deleuze identifies as the “crystal-image,” where actual and virtual images coalesce.

Second, I experienced a vivid audiovisual flashback to a television series I frequently watched in Tehran: Mirza Kuchak Khan-e Jangali (original title: Koochak-e Jangali, 1987). This historical figure, Mirza Kuchak Khan, was a prominent Iranian revolutionary who led the Jangal (Forest) Movement in Gilan province during the tumultuous early twentieth century, advocating for national sovereignty and social reform. Amidst the political upheaval following World War I and the Russian Revolution, he strategically allied with Soviet forces to establish the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic in June 1920. This unrecognised political entity, situated in northwestern Iran south of the Caspian Sea, aimed to implement socialist principles but endured only until September 1921. Internal ideological divisions—particularly between Kuchak Khan’s nationalist vision and more radical communist elements—coupled with external pressures from the central Iranian government and foreign powers, precipitated the republic’s dissolution. Despite its ephemeral existence, the republic remains a significant episode in Iran’s historical struggle against imperialism and for self-determination. The series’s extraordinary soundtrack played vividly in my consciousness as Shahin performed, creating what Bergson would describe as a “cone of memory,” where past and present interpenetrated.

Third, in the Berlin venue, I observed a woman I had not encountered in over twenty-five years, formerly the partner of one of my closest friends in Iran. During our adolescence, we frequently socialised together. Witnessing her now, physically transformed by time yet retaining the energetic essence of youth, created a sensation of temporal layering, as though I had shed the accumulated weight of chronological time and returned to a past moment, experiencing familiar presences anew. This phenomenon reflects what Bergson articulates as the coexistence of different temporal planes within memory, where “the past is preserved in itself.”

Cinematic Resonances and Afterimage

I became acutely aware of my own “mental ecology”—how anxieties and memories streamed beneath the surface of conscious thought.

Moreover, by curating Iranian and Middle Eastern artists in a European club, Moosavi implicitly highlighted another Anthropocenic dimension: the movement of peoples under climate and political duress. The festival’s name, Frequencies of Displacement, thus acquires a double meaning: it refers not only to musical frequencies but also to the frequencies of forced migration and exilic memory that characterise our age. In the Anthropocene’s “different trajectory for the Earth system,” such cross-border cultural intensities foreground the collapse of old boundaries and the emergence of new, entangled modes of being.

The listener becomes a ghostly viewer, tracing lines between sound and image in the mind’s eye, between past traumas and future anxieties. In the echo chambers of memory and culture, the performance demonstrated how art can suspend us between worlds—a place of “non-belonging” and “universalities” at once. Drawing on a cinematic lineage, it transformed the club into a theatre of mourning and metamorphosis, reminding us that in our Anthropocene era, art may offer one of the few spaces where we can slow time, confront our displacement, and listen to the ghosts of a fractured world.