Radio Web MACBA dug up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Jennifer Lucy Allan that were not included the first time around.

The foghorn is a sonic marker used in conditions of low visibility to alert vessels of hidden navigational hazards. Part of the coastal landscape since its invention in the nineteenth century, foghorns became obsolete with the rise of automatic alert systems or simpler devices such as compressed air horns. Writer and researcher Jennifer Lucy Allan dedicated her doctoral thesis to the social and cultural history of the foghorn, ‘a sound that’s lost and not lost at the same time’, and which ‘suggests loneliness and isolation, but is simultaneously a wordless reassurance to those out at sea that there’s a human presence nearby.’

In this podcast Allan talks about foghorns, meteorology and aurality, about volumes, distance and communities, about sounds disconnected from their function, holes in YouTube, amateur archivists and holes in official archives.

Photo Courtesy of the organisation