Academy - Berlin

September 3 - 7, 2024: 

Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind. - adrienne maree brown

In the publication, Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown guides us to an appreciation for how complex systems are constituted by a multiplicity of small-scale interactions. This includes engaging with ways of organizing and being in community, as well as fostering ways of feeling and negotiating interdependency. Such an understanding for brown is grounded in giving attention to the living ecosystems of natural worlds, where emergence is fundamental and change abundant. From biological invention to symbiotic adaptation, emergence is positioned as a potent guide to help “grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” Following brown, this edition of The Listening Academy focuses on emergence, posing listening itself as an emergent strategy. As an emergent strategy, listening contributes to nurturing greater planetary engagement and transcultural understanding by its ability to attend to small-scale interactions, the specificities and particularities of persons and living things. This includes the capacity to listen out for the unheard and the less-than-audible, thereby shifting the borders of the sensible with its patient and persistent work, as well as opening paths for tending to the unfinished histories and broken lives that haunt our social-political worlds. 

We’re interested to research and test listening as an emergent strategy, and how it may contribute to manifesting the just and liberated worlds we long for. This will integrate a number of key concerns and directions, including: exploring ways of listening to and through conflict (witnessing and repair); attuning and re-tuning sonic sensitivities (navigating multi-agent awareness); listening as a path to creative-collaborative embodiments (feelings of interdependency); acoustic justice and the language of listening (becoming a listening-citizen); and using collective listening as a tool for imagining possible future communities (noticing and sensing otherwise).

Through collaborative sharing, reflection and investigation, we’ll follow these and other directions in order to map listening as an emergent strategy. This will include material testing and creative methodology, involving ourselves in experiences and experiments in listening as well as relating to our environments. Through the exchange of individual and shared knowledges, we aim to deepen understanding of listening’s role in shaping change. 

The Listening Academy Berlin is facilitated by Giada Dalla Bontà, Golnoosh Heshmati, Brandon LaBelle and Suvani Suri, with the participation of Clare Cooper, Giulia Crisci, Femke Dekker, Juana del Mar, Stijn Dickel, Uzma Falak, Ira Ferris, Susanne Grau, Shareeka Helaluddin, Liva Hage, Heidi Hart, Marc Herbst, Heidi Holmström, Irini Kalogeropoulou, Marlijn Karsten, Farah Kassem, Yulia Carolin Kothe, Lukas Lund, Jake Mehew, Aine Nakamura, Ginevra Naldini and Marco Isaias Bertoglio, Arman Nouri, ether O, Anna Orlikowska, Morten Poulsen, Camila Proto, Sarina Scheidegger, Angus Tarnawsky, Hany Tea, Myriam Van Imschoot, Arushi Vats, Ellen Waterman, Henry Weekes, and Nicola Zolin.

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