PSA Public Lecture — Ruth Oldham & Juan Guillermo Dumay

PSA Public Lecture x Theatrum Mundi — "The Background Buzz and Electrical Poetics"

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 6 pm, 52 rue Bichat 75010 Paris

Free and open to the public, followed by drinks

Ruth Oldham trained as an architect in Glasgow, Paris and at the Bartlett. After several years practicing architecture in Paris, she now teaches architectural history, translates architecture and art related texts from French to English, and carries out independent research and writing projects.

Juan Guillermo Dumay is an artist, sound engineer and musician. He creates site-specific works using different materials, such as multi-channel pieces and kaleidoscopic improvisations combining electronic music, amplified sounds and raw noise. He holds an MA in Musique Acousmatique et Arts Sonores from Gustave Eiffel University (Paris-Est-Marne-La Vallée).

Together, they will present a project that englobes two strands of urban exploration centred upon electrical substations - discreet but numerous pieces of infrastructure embedded within the urban landscape. One strand involves the continuum sounds and noises emanating from the infrastructure, the other the surprising poetry involved in its system of naming and identification. It is a project about immersion in our everyday environment. It is about tuning into the specific qualities of individual sites: acoustic reflections that result from the form of the street, or the history of the site, hinted at in the name of the substation. It proposes a sonic methodology for revealing the wider infrastructural network that threads its way through our societies and lives, via these substations that are tiny parts of a vast system.

The talk forms part of a series in collaboration with Theatrum Mundi, drawing on its archive of publications and projects to explore bioclimatic urbanism through creative research.

Images:
INTELLO, STOKVIS (© Ruth Oldham)
SUBSTATION SPECTROGRAM (© Juan Guillermo Dumay)

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Host or Publisher Paris School of Architecture — PSA