Academy - Turku

November 11 - 12, 2022: Amidst the thickening atmospheres of social suffocation (Górska 2021), we feel an urgent need to generate more possibilities of care-ful more-than-human togetherness, to gather, imagine, practice and dream of ways to listen towards a more liveable world. We are critically curious about ways to listen toward disturbances and critical interventions that (should) remain unnoticed by dominant structures which brew unliveability of today’s social and worldly currents. In what ways can listening be mobilized as a form of critical intervention, one that can impact onto scenes of personal and political struggle? How might listening be queered? How might listening queer imaginaries of subversion? How might quietness, opacities, echoes, whispers and other liminal sonorous phenomena be figured amidst situations of contestation? How might listening be utilized and offered within experiences of unbreatheability? And how may listening and breathing intertwine, enrich or challenge each other’s political capacities to endure the worldly condition and situatedly subvert it?

Furthermore, The Listening Academy remains devoted to listening to(ward) multispecies relationalities, to listen locatedly and situatedly. This November it listens with Titanik and Turku that respectively dwell by the two bodies of water – Aura River and the Baltic Sea. In attunement to these locations and agencies, we are interested in listening as a way of transformative ecological – aqueous and elemental – storytelling. What sonorous epistemologies might listening with these waters – their waves, tides, algae – suggest? How do these waters connect to other bodies of water, other ecologies? How might wider elemental ecologies of a space nuance current economies of individual and communal attention and encourage listening toward a more liveable world? What forms of knowledge emerge from related sonic practices and projects, from listening understood as an experimental, relational political charged process?

Following these and all the rhyming or sibling lines of questioning, The Listening Academy aims at fostering transdisciplinary discussions on the topic of listening which can contribute to understandings and acts of meaningful noticing, recognition, repair and restoration. This includes nurturing new imaginaries and knowledges around what it means to hear and be heard, to voice and respond, within today’s planetary environment.

Presentations and sharing with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Milla Tiainen and Sini Mononen, Riikka Juntunen, Meri Kytö, Anouk Mirte Hoogendoorn and Ben Muñoz, Camille Auer, Kati Roover, Taru Elfving, Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen, Carmelo Pampillonio, Yvonne Billimore, and Katarina Blomqvist. Convened by Anastasia (A) Khodyreva and Brandon LaBelle. Including the public launch of the publication, Radical Sympathy, from Errant Bodies Press.