Academy - Madrid

October 16 & 17, 2026: Escuela Municipal de Música y Danza Maria Dolores Pradera (Friday) and Espíritu23 coworking space (Saturday)

Cosmopoetic Listening emphasizes poetic thinking and imagination as ways of connecting with the pulsating vitality of the world, its living agency, and matter's relationality in all its complexity. As a conceptual framework it takes guidance from traditions of poetic knowledge, which are positioned in contrast to modern scientific methods of objectivity and dissection. Rather, poetic knowledge is a subjective, sympathetic knowledge grounded in the senses, and lends to knowing by way of the inside. As such, knowing by way of a poetic consciousness is to recognize connections across subjects and objects, human and other-than-human; it is to adopt a position of admiration in contrast to analysis, opening onto paths of “cosmic connection”. As Gaston Bachelard proposes, “poetic imagination does not lead to society, but to the cosmos.” 

Moreover, poetic knowledge follows from the distinction Hannah Arendt makes between “knowing” and “thinking,” where knowing is aligned with the search for truth and thinking instead with meaning and wisdom. For Arendt, the “will to know” has become a dominant force within human society undermining our ability to think freely. María Zambrano takes this a step further by introducing a subtle distinction between “thinking” and the “poetic”. Whereas thought tends to draw things into itself, “poetry” — or rather, the poetic — “is called to sing what is being born. And above all, what is born in contradiction to, and despite, all that surrounds it.” In this sense, the poetic brings together the freedom that Arendt associates with thinking and a will to resist, while opening up forms of relation that remain free from the stabilizing structures of thought.

It becomes important to question the dynamics of what we understand as “knowledge production” given the establishment of the knowledge economy as a prevailing system in which information and data function as forms of power and currency. As Achille Mbembe suggests, it’s imperative to invent a new form of “reason” against the logic of computation today. What kind of reason might this be? We’ll consider poetic reasoning as what may contribute to challenging dominant systems with their related forms of colonial-capitalist enclosure – finding in poetic knowledge a means for reclaiming a material-spiritual logic of connection and correspondence. To act poetically, as Fred Moten highlights, is to refuse to be settled, giving way to the invention of worlds. 

We’re interested in exploring these perspectives by gathering different theoretical references as well as creative practices. This includes mapping a number of related methodologies experimenting with a cosmopoetic form of listening. Cosmopoetic Listening is posed  as a trajectory of research which can contribute to thinking poetic knowledge today. Cosmopoetic Listening is a creative listening that recognizes a plurality of worlds, and that forms the basis for nurturing feelings of interdependency. As Éduoard Glissant has articulated, ways of overcoming histories of colonial violence are supported through a “poetics of relation” and made manifest in a “world of echoes” that is modern life.. These are echoes that interrupt borders placed between “us” and “them”, “self” and “other”, suggesting poetics as a path for figuring a multiplicity of identities and meanings. 

Organized and facilitated by María Andueza Olmedo and Brandon LaBelle with Luis Guerra Miranda and María Salgado, including the participation of Shirin Salehi, Yuri Tuma, Carlos Monleon-Gendall, Coco Moya , Samuel Perea Diaz, Clara De Pedro, Ignacio Miro, Fátima Cué Pérez, Gema FB Martín, Javier Navarro Delgado, Davi de Lacerda, Monserrat Magana Lorente, Manuel Lallana Babilóni, María del Buey Cañas, Julia Yu Ospina, Ananda Culebras Landa, Bárbara Perdiguera, Cristina Villaruiz, Miguel Ballarin, Gonzalo Cruzado, Lila Insua Lintridis, Juan Manuel Hermoso Sánchez, Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero, Anna Mundet Molas, Jimena Guajardo, Marije Hristova.

With the support of Acciones Especiales de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid AEUCM12/26.