Academy - Goa

December 15-23, 2023: Can listening become a context-aware sensing act that takes place beyond the here and now to probe into historical complexities? The immediate navigational judgments we ascribe listening with may often reduce the potentialities of the listening act. Can we imagine listening as a slow, molecular process of attunement across self and others, which can support decolonial, relational, environmental, migratory and epistemological resonances to emerge? What begins as an expanded process of attuning across oneself and others may become a fertile base of empowerment and world-making activity. 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 embodied, ethical and critical capacity that can impact onto 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. In particular, this edition planned in collaboration with the Serendipity Arts Festival focuses on the inaudible, and how listening enables an engagement with the unheard, the silent, the forgotten, the repressed. The inaudible is highlighted as an emptiness at the center of the sensible. Listening will be activated as a negative methodology for approaching that which resists capture but also refuses to go away: from personal and collective memory to the invisible systems impacting futures, from disappearing planetary life to hidden social worlds, the Academy will open a space for collective research and creative engagement with inaudibility and the unheard.

Emphasizing the potentiality of listening as a practice and method, the Academy invites participants to join for a week-long workshop where we’ll discuss, explore, listen and attune to questions of inaudibility. This will include an exchange of knowledge and practices through lectures from invited guests, reading and listening sessions, as well as collaborative material investigations and situated field work in Goa, given its historically enriching acoustic territories.

With participating artists, musicians, curators and researchers Rishabh Bhan Singh, Kirsten Stromberg, Nora Prossliner, Tasneem Lohani, Sangeeta Lerner, Jagannathan Krishnan, Mothe mahesh, Surbhi Mittal, Emma Kieran Schaefer, Susannah Langley, Harsh Gandhi, Nakshatra Chatterjee, Gaurav Singh, Sarah Lawton, Rakesh Ojha, Samson Ezekiel, Rhea Lopez, Daniel Kitt, Joel Stern, Sreerag Jyothish, Deep Shah, Suvani Suri.

Organized and facilitated by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and Brandon LaBelle, in collaboration with the Serendipidity Arts Festival.