A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range of perspectives in which his propositions reverberate, the publication attends to what he does, and to the political and performative potential of the past that he opens up.

This book was published in the context of the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020. Alongside a publication conceived in relation to the programme Coming to Know, A Slightly Curving Place inaugurates a series of volumes titled An Archaeology of Listening.

Contributions by Alexander Keefe, Umashankar Manthravadi, Vinit Agarwal, Moushumi Bhowmik, Nida Ghouse, Sukanta Majumdar, Padmini Chettur, Maarten Visser , and others.