Academy - Basel
August 28-September 3, 2023: If we could rest our ears on this troubled earth, what could we hear? Can listening become a context-aware sensing act that takes place beyond the here and now? The immediate navigational judgments we ascribe listening with may often reduce the potentialities of the listening act. Can we imagine listening as a slow process of self-attunement to probe into the historical, environmental, post-cognitive or philosophical resonances felt on the surface of this damaged earth? What begins as an expanded process of attuning across oneself and others, may become a fertile promise of empowerment. Listening is then not only a humanistic faculty of sensing within the context of everyday survival, but also a method for nurturing greater planetary co-existence with more-than-human others. Listening emerges as an act that can impact on dominant structures and systems that work to exclude and extract, allowing for alternative practices.
The Listening Academy is a research academy aimed at investigating listening as a creative and critical practice, one that can assist in fostering greater relationality and mutuality, as well as co-learning and co-creation. Emphasising the potentiality of listening as a relational act, the Academy invites participants to join for a week-long summer camp where we’ll discuss, explore, listen, forage and attune to a range of critical topics. This includes a focus on “listening and wildness”. Wildness is highlighted here as the rhythms, encounters and symbiotic processes that define living things. From the biophonic soundings of entangled planetary life to the interdependencies that link bodies, wildness is positioned as a framework for listening beyond singularity. Instead, we’ll bring concentration to the extremely complex world of sound and listening, asking in what ways sonic materiality and experience are generative of multiplicity and biodiversity. This includes a consideration of urban wilds as found in the city of Basel, and the potential cross-over between gardening and listening, gleaning and improvising, composting and composing.
From questions of planetary co-existence and radical hospitality to collaborative artistic creation and poetic sensing, the Academy will open a shared space for exchanging knowledge and practices. Through lectures from invited guests, reading and listening sessions, as well as collaborative material investigations, we’ll work at wilding new forms of artistic research.
Facilitated by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and Brandon LaBelle. With participating artists Verica Kovacevska, Therese Naess Diesen, Hannah Mackaness, Juliana Espana Keller, Barbara Preissig, and Junying Wu.
