Academy - Cairo

September 1 - 4, 2026: On Cosmopoetic Sound

In the book, Sounds Wild and Broken, David Haskell maps the ways in which sound underpins the emergence and evolution of living matter, where cosmic pulses have come to shape celestial bodies. This is elaborated by recognizing the deep connection between sound and movement, vibration and the living: the hair-like cilia of the inner ear carries this fundamental connection, reminding how hearing and movement, balance and orientation, are expressive of a primary acoustic force key to material vitality.

Considering this biological, material significance, this edition of The Listening Academy explores sound as an animating, energetic force, one that passes through bodies, environments, worlds and things. As such, sound is often that medium which connects the terrestrial and the divine, the vibrational and the transmitted, daily struggles and cultural movements, leading to deep and enduring meanings. This includes an appreciation for sound as what comes to indicate or manifest a “culture of life”, lending to conditions that honor and support livability: to be sound is to feel well, and to sense when things are out of balance or injured. 

Following understandings of sound as animate force, and as what supports a culture of life, the Academy opens a collaborative framework for investigating sound as a practice of vitality. Through creative, critical discussions and collective material investigations, we’ll bring sound to life, following it as a means for challenging the prevailing logic of “necropower” today. As Achille Mbembe argues, an “ideology of death” defines much of the political world, where exclusion, discrimination, violence and war are normalized. Against such a logic, we’ll listen into and with sound as a Cosmopoetic Being whose vibratory, resonant, and noisy nature emerges as a carrier of vitality: as what animates and holds stories of resistance, communal bonds, struggles for freedom and embodied memory. By way of such a focus, sound is considered an important contribution to wielding what Amitav Ghosh calls a “vitalist politics” in support of life. While sound may certainly harm and hurt, we’ll attend to it as a force of vitality, one that can teach of the cosmic thunders, the social currents, and the radical sympathies shaping relations. 

Organized and facilitated by Sara Hamdy, Brandon LaBelle, with participants Margarita Novikova, Sara El-Saray, Magda Magdy, Luis Filipe and Dora Naspolini, Malak Hossam, Mohamed Mahgoub, Suhwa Kim, Hearin Jeong, Johanna Schütt, Sophie Frankford, Salma Elhusseiny Ebada, Eman Mahmoud Sherif Zahran, Raymond Magdy, Patricia Hegglin, ( ether o ) Chia-Liang Lai, Habiba Sallam , Abla Abd El Naby, Shadwa Ali, Marialuisa Carpuso, Yi-Cheng (Zoe) Lin, MaayanTsadka, Afef Omri, Kio Griffith, Catalina Swinburn, Bea Lamar, Tahra Tarek.