About

Within today’s intensely polarized environment, in which social and political debate often tend toward conflict or impasse, might listening enact an intervention? While focus is often placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of free speech, listening is radically key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, and social transformation. To listen is to extend the boundaries of the familiar, the recognized, and the known, through a form of radical receptivity. In addition, listening affords more egalitarian, decolonized, and ecologically-attuned relations, staggering exclusionary systems and human exceptionalism by way of empathic, attentional, and more-than-human orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self and other. Listening is a power, it may open and hold, it may support and attend, and it may afford escape and deep friendship. And yet listening is greatly undervalued and neglected across society. 

THE LISTENING BIENNIAL draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. From radical empathy to sonic practice, quiet refusal to somatic wellbeing, eavesdropping to ecological attunement, listening wields a creative and critical force that may contribute to maintaining the diversity of our social adventure.

THE LISTENING BIENNIAL brings together an international constellation of participating artists, curators and researchers, as well as institutions and collectives, to foster questions and experiences of listening. The Listening Biennial is conceived as a global project and aims at a decentralized structure where shared resonances and cooperative manifestations can emerge across localities. This includes the commissioning and exhibition of audio works, experimental performances, and discursive events hosted and presented at collaborating institutions and venues, where listening and locality are accentuated, and cultural specificities contribute to a greater ecology of attention. From critical storytelling, experimental noise, and musical rapture to acoustic care, interspecies contact, and ecologies of sounded matter, the Biennial aims at fostering listening cultures.

The first edition of THE LISTENING BIENNIAL was launched in 2021 and included the participation of thirty international artists presented at fourteen partner organizations and venues. This was followed in 2023, with the second edition of the Biennial being held at over twenty-two partner locations.

THE LISTENING BIENNIAL is managed by a team of artists, curators, scholars and organizers, including artistic director Brandon LaBelle with partners Annette le Fort and Octavio Carmago; curatorial associates Rayya Badran, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Israel Martínez, Luísa Santos, Yang Yeung and Dayang Yraola. In addition, Lucia Farinati (London), Anastasia (A) Khodyreva (Turku), and Sara Hamdy (Cairo) contribute curatorially to The Listening Academy and related initiatives. Sophie M acts as assistant and researcher, helping manage  communications and development. THE LISTENING BIENNIAL works at fostering a transnational network comprised of partner institutions, organizations and spaces, including SomaRumor (Rio de Janeiro), Lydgalleriet (Bergen), la Asociación de Música Electroacústica de España (Madrid), l’École d’art of Université Laval (Quebec), soundpocket (Hong Kong), Tsonami Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso), among others. In addition, the Biennial is supported by many friends and colleagues whose expertise and passion contribute greatly to ongoing activities.