The Listening Academy Online – Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care
Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care
with Brandon LaBelle, Piersandra Di Matteo and Anna Papaeti
June 20, 27 July 4, 11 / 14:00-16:30 CEST (online)
Across diverse contexts and situations, the experience of being heard emerges as foundational. From personal, localized situations to broader social and national contexts, being heard supports feeling recognized, fostering psychological and emotional health as well as essential forms of collective empowerment. While being heard is grounded in dialogue and the ability to speak to each other, it is clearly metaphoric as well, leading to a broader experience: as Gideon Calder argues, it’s important that we listen out for those voices that exceed a given acoustic arena, or that speak otherwise. There is an urgency to being heard, one that calls for greater attention as well as critical, creative ways of speaking and listening.
Extending from these concerns, this seminar course investigates the concept of acoustic justice. Acoustic justice is posed as a framework for addressing the structures that impact onto ways of being heard, and how it is we may listen out for the unheard. What types of strategies or tactics does such listening suggest? How to contend with particular acoustic norms that greatly influence the work of being heard? Is not listening out for requiring more nuanced forms of sensing as well as acoustic imagination? And what of situations where listening is strained by what it hears – by what is unlistenable? Through lectures, collective readings and explorative discussion, the course aims to elaborate understandings of acoustic justice and how it may contribute to a range of practices. To do so, the course is structured around four main themes or sonic figures, including: vibrational worlds, social a/synchronization, echoic performativity, and making noise/holding silence. Through such a conceptual and material framework, we’ll work at deepening an understanding of how hearing and being heard are experienced and performed, enabled and protected. This will include engaging a range of topics, including: social resonance and restorative practice, witnessing and auditory trauma, crip care and experimental sonic creation.
Following selected theoretical references and case studies, an acoustic justice model will be mapped, also drawing upon participants’ own work and contexts. What does hearing and being heard mean in different social and cultural contexts, and for different bodyminds? We will learn from each other, bringing together a diversity of perspectives and propositions. This will include exploring the idea of acoustic care as a practice aimed at supporting being heard in diverse ways.
We welcome letters of interest from researchers, organizers and practitioners curious to explore questions of acoustic justice and acoustic care. Each session will be structured around explorative lectures by Brandon LaBelle, Piersandra Di Matteo and Anna Papaeti, as well as readings into selected texts, followed by an open discussion with participants as a way of collecting diverse viewpoints. In addition, we will discuss together the possibility of organizing additional sessions in which participants may present their current work and research, so as to enhance conversation as well as individual research.
The course is limited to 25 participants. We kindly request a tuition of 100 euro for attending the course. Please send letters, sharing details on your interest in the topic, along with a short CV by May 20, 2025; questions or inquiries can also be addressed to: listeningaca@gmail.com
Schedule:
1. June 20: Vibrational Worlds with Brandon LaBelle, on a poetics and politics of affection (social resonance and questions of touch)
2. June 27: Social a/synchronization with Brandon LaBelle, on acoustic care, crip time and negotiating dominant structures (reflections on crafting shared rhythms and alternative temporalities)
3. July 4: Echoic performativity with Anna Papaeti, introduced by Brandon LaBelle, on listening as witnessing (reflections on auditory trauma, the ethics of witnessing, and performing testimony)
4. July 11: Making noise/holding silence with Piersandra Di Matteo, "Towards a Transmaterial Listening: The Deaf Perspective", introduced by Brandon LaBelle, on sounding a political ecology of volume (from the work of disturbance to fostering diverse forms of listening)
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist and artistic director of The Listening Biennial. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian(2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Piersandra Di Matteo is a performing arts scholar, curator, and dramaturg. She is member of the Research Centers: PerLA| Performance Epistemologies Research Lab, and SSH | Sound Studies Hub at the Università Iuav of Venice, where she teaches Curating Performing Arts. Her interests range from the contemporary theatre to the politics of the voice and listening, from practice of curatorship to accessibility. She has been invited to hold conferences and seminars in international research centres and Universities, among other in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Montréal, Amsterdam, New York City, Philadelphia, São Paulo. She has been the artistic director of Short Theatre (Rome, 2021–2024), fermento (2022/2023), Atlas of Transitions Bienniale (Bologna, 2017–2020).She is Romeo Castellucci’s closest theoretical collaborator and dramaturg. Among her recent publications: A bocca chiusa. Effetti di ventriloquio e scena contemporanea (2024), and (ed.) SPEAKING NEARBY (2024), performance + curatela (2021), with A. Sacchi and I. Caleo, In fiamme. La performance nello spazio delle lotte (1967-1979) (2021).
Anna Papaeti (PhD, King’s College, London) is Research Associate Professor at the University of Cyprus and Principle Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing (MUTE). She writes about opera, the nexus of music, sound and trauma, and the intersections of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. She held two Marie Skłodowska Curie FELLOWSHIPS at the University of Goettingen (FP7, 2011–2014) and at Panteion University, ATHENS (2017–2019, Horizon 2020) respectively. Her research has been supported by the European Commission, ONASSIS FOUNDATION, Research Centre for the Humanities, and DAAD (UK). She has published widely in collected volumes and scholarly journals, and has co-edited two special issues on music in detention. She is also a research-based-art practitioner, working in sound and textual forms. She created the podcast The Undoing of Music for Museo Nacional Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2019), as well as the installations The Dark Side of the Tune for the exhibition ‘Hypnos’ at ONASSIS STEGI (ATHENS, 2016) and Néos Parthenónas for the exhibition ‘Iasis’ (Loutraki, 2019), both created with Nektarios Pappas.