Academy – Lisbon

January 19 - 22, 2026;

Following current concerns for greater planetary awareness and engagement, this edition of The Listening Academy aims to bring focus to ideas and practices of elemental collaboration. This entails developing research and reflections on what constitutes the elemental and its fundamental presence today. From the air in our lungs, the water in our bodies, to the earth in our bones, the fire in our hearts, the elemental is highlighted as foundational to human vitality as well as a crucial means for sensing and storying planetary coexistence. To engage these critical concerns, we’re interested to animate this living interdependency by opening an explorative space for experimental gestures of attunement and collective sharing which can aid in upsetting and reorienting dominant forms of human exceptionalism. In what ways might we cultivate practices of reciprocity, to give expression to what Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer highlights as a “grammar of animacy”?

Guided by invited artists, researchers and organizers, the Academy sets out to collectively cultivate a grammar of animacy. Organized around a set of daily journeys into elaborated forms of sensing and synchronizing with surrounding environments and voices, we’ll collect methodologies and imaginings, elaborating the potentiality of elemental collaboration. This includes a focus on geology and the seismic, radio and electromagnetism, site-sensitivity and situated fieldwork, elemental ghosts and water bodies. Through enlivening connections with the elemental, we’ll work at fostering a grammar of animacy, mapping diverse approaches which can contribute to planetary practices.

Inviting entanglements across discrete matter and vibrant energies, tangible entities and diffuse vapors, visible forms and invisible forces, concrete structures and atmospheric pressures, we’ll listen-with the local environment as an expression of a greater elemental world. This includes an engagement with the politics of the elemental today, and how the ongoingness of colonial capture destroys ecological flourishing and the lives of many. Moreover, we're concerned to think how elemental collaboration can be integrated within institutional structures: what would an institutional practice be that gestures toward a grammar of animacy? Can we conceptualize a form of biopoetical power in support of holistic forms of reconnection? 

This edition of The Listening Academy is envisioned as a hospitable coming together by which to gather individual concerns and practices, questions and rhythms, to cultivate together an animating form of listening.

Participating guests and facilitators include anna andrejew, Monaí de Paula Antunes, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Taru Elfving, Pablo Torres Goméz, Brandon LaBelle, Margarida Mendes, Luísa Santos, with the participation of Jule Kurbjeweit, Letizia Artioli, Reina del Mar, Wenlin Tan, Júlia Duarte Nunes, Hugo Reis, Anna Orlikowska, Adi Louria-Hayon, Mamadou Diallo, Nina Fraser, Bertha Diaz Martinez, Helen Hines, Joana Coelho, Gaia Molinari, Irazema Vera, Chris Muller, Maria Duran Marques, Emily Orley, Adam Jovanovic Kaasa, Molly Astley, Alexandra Strelcova, Michelle Lewis-King, Soledad Rodriguez, Sam Amsler, Ines Marita, Alexander De Little, Laetitia Kozlova, Ayse Koklu, Susana Mouzinho, Giovanbattista Tusa, Mariana Pintocoelho, Nico Espinoza, Melaina Barnes, Carlos Pastor Garcia, Jorge Ramos, Henrique Varanda, Nomonde, Renea Behluli, Beatriz Galardini, Ines Alves, Mikhail Karikis, Júlia Lema Barros, Elina Waage Mikalsen. 

Location: CAM - Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian. Organized in the context of Institution(ing)s, on innovating sustainable institutional practices.