Ghostly sound: exploring migration and memory through immersive sound in Rare Sun

Rare Sun (2024) is a performance directed by Furkan Ak, and premiered at the Royal Flemish Theatre (KVS Box) in Brussels, Belgium. As director and co-writer of this performance, I examine how immersive sound technology functions as a hauntological device in contemporary performance-making to challenge empathy-driven migration narratives and engage audiences critically. In this document, I share my research through practical tools and methods used to combine hauntology and immersive sound, exploring how live and binaural recording can create an ‘in-between’ space of listening and encounter. Rare Sun tells a story of migration, friendship, and belonging through a diaristic journey across cities and generations shaped by memory and displacement. The performance resists empathy-based storytelling by engaging with haunting, absence, and memory as creative and critical strategies. Through the layering of live presence and binaural soundscapes, it constructs spectral geographies where traces of Berlin, Brussels, and Istanbul intersect, dissolving temporal and spatial boundaries. I aim to contribute to the field of performance studies by proposing hauntology as a dramaturgical approach that redefines immersive technologies as practices fostering critical perception, shared presence, and new ways of listening in performance.