The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he began measuring the acoustic properties of a premodern performance space in the mid-1990s, and has been building ambisonic microphones since the early 2000s in order to carry out his project in further locations. Bringing together writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound designers, A Slightly Curving Place is an exhibition that responds to Umashankar's practice and proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. Umashankar asserts that we cannot just look for theatres in landscapes of the past; we must listen for them. In this dossier, contributors to the exhibition extend the notion of listening to an archaeological site to include practices of listening to text, textures, technologies, the body and the fields of recording.