Jon Curry-Machado is a writer, historical researcher, and performer who has worked closely with Cuba since the 1990s in projects ranging from the visual arts and film making, to poetry and performance. His research has focused on the history of sugar, its technologies, peoples, and environments. Curry-Machado leads the audio-visual strategy of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project, based at the University of London, as well as founder member of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, Associate Fellow at the Institute for Latin American Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London), and the Institute of the Americas (University College London). He recently produced the documentary Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (2019).
By disjointing acts of listening from the ear and its particular arrangement of time, Sonic Continuum proposes a shift from representation to expression and asks: can sound restitute failures to listen? How might we listen to time affectively? What auditory imaginaries and possible futures can listening unfold?
In this short essay, historian Jon Curry-Machado explores what might be gained by opening our ears to the sounds of Cuban sugar plantations.