Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care - festival
Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care
(The Listening Biennial)
July 9 - 12, 2026 / Berlin
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 mental 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 range of experiences and practices. As Gideon Calder argues, it’s important that we listen out for those voices that exceed a given acoustic arena, or that speak and narrate otherwise. There is an urgency to being heard, one that calls for greater attention as well as critical, creative ways of sounding and listening.
Extending from these concerns, we’re glad to announce a program of talks, workshops, performances and listening assemblies investigating the concept of acoustic justice, acoustic care. Acoustic justice, acoustic care 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 unrecognized or silenced. 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 as well as our embodied sense of feeling connected? Is not listening out for others requiring nuanced forms of sensing and acoustic imagination? And what of situations where listening is strained by what it hears – by what is unlistenable? Bringing together contributing artists, researchers, curators and organizers, the program aims to elaborate understandings of acoustic justice, acoustic care and how it may contribute to creative, critical listening cultures.
Contributing artists and researchers:
Manuela García Aldana AKA Amuleto Manuela, Max Bloching, Katarina Blomqvist, Marialuisa Carpuso, Dora Đurkesac, Carlotta Sofia Grassi, Hanna Grześkiewicz / Yasemin Keskintepe, James Hazel, Patricia Hegglin, Anja Kreysing, Brandon LaBelle, Inês Nin, ( ether o ) Chia-Liang Lai, Paula Montecinos Oliva, ~pes (Elizabeth Gallón Droste / Pablo Torres Gómez), Nunzia Picciallo, Morten Poulsen, Kristoff K.Roll–Carole Rieussec, Maria Ristani, Inneke Taal, Sofia T. Theodosiadou, Marie Yevkiné Tirard, Katía Truijen, Yuri Tuma, Lorena Moreno Vera, Hui Ye
Locations:
The Listening Biennial Studio, Lettestrasse 7, 10437 Berlin
Errant Sound project space, Gerichtstrasse 45, 13347 Berlin
Helmholtzplatz 10437 Berlin
PROGRAM
Thursday, July 9, 19:00 - 22:00
The Listening Biennial Studio, Lettestrasse 7, 10437 Berlin
Join us for the opening of the Cosmopoetic Studio / launch of Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care program
With creative offerings and special book presentation (20:00) of Hosting Space by Maike Statz.
The Studio is open throughout the duration of the festival, July 10 - 12, 14:00 - 18:00 each day: we invite you to drop in for restful sessions of gong meditation, to share stories and offerings, or to hang out over a fresh cup of tea or lemonade, listening and viewing related creative works by participating artists.
Friday, July 10, 14:30 - 16:30 (workshop)
The Listening Biennial Studio, Lettestrasse 7, 10437 Berlin
Cosmopoetic Workshop, with Brandon LaBelle, Patricia Hegglin, ( ether o ) Chia-Liang Lai
Please join us as we explore Cosmopoetics as a conceptual proposition and creative framework, and how this lends to a diverse range of practices aimed at poetic knowledge and cosmic connection. (Ideas of Cosmopoetics are being developed as a curatorial framing for The Listening Biennial 2027 and will be elaborated through a series of ongoing activities with invited guests starting in September.)
Friday, July 10, 19:30 - 23:00 (performances, talks: see program notes for more details)
Errant Sound project space, Gerichtstrasse 45, 13347 Berlin
Manuela García Aldana AKA Amuleto Manuela, Circular Listening (lecture performance)
Yuri Tuma, Interspecies Communication and Technologies of Misunderstanding (sensorial presentation)
~pes (Elizabeth Gallón Droste / Pablo Torres Gómez), I build my language with rocks (sound performance)
( ether o ) Chia-Liang Lai, Sound of melting glacier (sound performance)
Saturday, July 11, 13:00 - 17:00 (workshops)
*workshops are open to the public. for more details see below. please send us a mail to register for the workshops: contact@listeningbiennial.net
The Listening Biennial Studio, Lettestrasse 7, 10437 Berlin / Helmholtzplatz 10437
(13:00) Dora Đurkesac, Shiver Practice
(14:30) Carlotta Sofia Grassi, Politics of Entrustment: Listening Through Difference
(16:00) Paula Montecinos Oliva, Sonic Feminist Fabulations: Live Radio Broadcast with sound pieces from Acoustic Justice - Acoustic Care group and discussion on radio practices
17:30 - 18:30: Listening Assembly (moderated Brandon LaBelle & Katía Truijen): On questions of listening, with Opening Gesture: A short sensory opening with local tree resin with Patricia Hegglin
Saturday, July 11, 20:00 - 23:00 (performances, screening: see program notes for more details)
Errant Sound project space, Gerichtstrasse 45, 13347 Berlin
Marie Yevkiné Tirard, Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic (vocal, instrumental sound performance)
Hui Ye, Songs of Oblivion: Prelude (screening, talk)
Nunzia Picciallo, tuning presence (performance)
Anja Kreysing, Segment 19 - FLUME (audio-visual performance)
Sunday, July 12, 13:00 - 17:00 (workshops)
*workshops are open to the public. for more details see below. please send us a mail to register for the workshops: contact@listeningbiennial.net
The Listening Biennial Studio, Lettestrasse 7, 10437 Berlin / Helmholtzplatz 10437
(13:00) Marialuisa Capurso, Opening, touching spaces
(14:30) Inneke Taal, Breathing Choir - a voiceless articulation
(16:00) Nunzia Picciallo, Somatic practice, listening in movement
17:30 - 18:30: Listening Assembly (moderated Brandon LaBelle & Katía Truijen): On questions of listening, with Opening Gesture: A short sensory opening with local tree resin with Patricia Hegglin
Sunday, July 12, 19:30 - 23:00 (talks, performances, screening: see program notes for more details)
Errant Sound project space, Gerichtstrasse 45, 13347 Berlin
Hanna Grześkiewicz / Yasemin Keskintepe, Burning Silence (participatory talk)
James Hazel, listening through precarity (performative talk)
Max Bloching, Ground Practice (screening)
Marialuisa Capurso, Some traces of Rubedo (vocal, instrumental performance)
The Acoustic Justice, Acoustic Care program is presented in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut and Errant Sound.
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WORKSHOPS
July 11:
Dora Đurkesac, Shiver Practice
Shiver Practice explores shivers as electric responses of the skin to sound vibrations. They occur between awe and fear, pleasure and repulsion, attraction and resistance. We follow shivers as interruptions of habitual ways of knowing. We listen to the skin as a surface that receives vibration, atmosphere, memory, and the presence of others. Anatomy of listening becomes the anatomy of movement. Working through guided listening and dance improvisations with sounds, touch, shaking, and syncopation, we experiment with attention and respond to what energizes or unsettles. Sensitivity and uncertainty become forces for movement or its refusal. We stay with differences as a part of the practice. No previous experience is required.
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Dora Đurkesac is an artist working at the intersection of contemporary dance, intermedia art, and design research. Her practice begins with the body as a site of knowledge, resistance, and transformation, unfolding through somatic, sonic, sculptural, and collective storytelling formats. Recent works include Polybodies, which maps contaminations of water and bodies, and Shivers, a moving and listening community practice. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, including at the Haubrok Foundation, Kreuzberg Pavilion, Centrum, Spike, Radialsystem Berlin, Neu Now Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Miroslav Kraljević Gallery, La MaMa Theater New York, and Tjarnarbíó Reykjavík. She studied new media at the Academy of Fine Arts and industrial design at the Design Studio in Zagreb.
Carlotta Sofia Grassi – 'Politics of Entrustment: Listening Through Difference'
A workshop of collective listening based on the practice of affidamento (entrustment). Through a series of movement and sound scores, participants will explore resonance as an encounter with difference, asymmetry, and multiple temporalities. A central practice is leaning: a subtle and sustained bodily inclination that shifts attention without seeking balance or resolution. Emerging from perceptual and choreographic practices that work with off-balance states and attentional movement, leaning operates as a mode of attunement where the body enters relation through partial orientation rather than fixed position. It opens perception toward presences beyond the human scale and forms of hyperperception, where listening extends beyond the audible into vibration, proximity, density, and environmental fluctuation. No previous experience is required.
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Carlotta Sofia Grassi is an artist and researcher working across performance, sound practices, and grassroots political processes. Her work moves through questions of perception, attention, and agency, engaging the material and social conditions of lived and collective experience. Drawing on experimental pedagogies and autonomous forms of knowledge production, she develops situated and collaborative methodologies grounded in listening, resonance, and collective inquiry. Attentive to the relational and poetic dimensions of the sensible, she creates contexts for encounter and attunement, where artistic practice becomes a space for reconfiguring ways of being together.
Paula Montecinos Oliva, 'Sonic Feminist Fabulations‘
Sonic Feminist Fabulations foregrounds the repositioning of the listener—and the act of listening itself, as an active perceptual practice. The project engages acoustic and affective spaces to explore how sound, body, technology, and social dynamics intersect, cultivating environments for reflection, connection, and experimental encounter. Listening in complicity with lifeforms, live materials, and the silences and noises in them. Sonic Feminist Fabulations (SFF) considers radio as a transformative social infrastructure, supporting collaborative, practice-led frameworks.
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Paula Montecinos Oliva (CL) is an artist, researcher and educator based in the Netherlands. With a background in choreography, somatic practices, and sound art, she explores the sonic body at the intersections of agency, memory, and collectivity. Her practice spans immersive sonic choreography, live electronics performance, experimental vocals, and radio broadcasts, conceived as vibrational architectures that shape spatiotemporal experience. She frequently engages in handcrafting sonic environments where antennas, synthesizers, microphones, and speaker-instruments open possibilities to gesture the poetics and politics of noise and silence, inviting a plurality of bodies.
July 12:
Marialuisa Capurso - “Opening, touching spaces” before ‘breathing choir ‘
This practice explores listening as an embodied practice capable of opening inner spaces through breath, attention, and sensory activation. Through guided breathing practices, breath exploration, movement, and collective listening exercises, participants are invited to expand their perception beyond hearing itself and engage listening as a physical, relational, and spatial experience. Where does the body begin and end? How do breath, vibration, sound, and presence reshape our perception of physical limits? Participants will investigate thresholds between interior and exterior, self and environment, silence and resonance, this space invites a deepening of perception, opening possibilities for experiencing the body as porous, dynamic, and continuously transformed through the intention to fall, to feel the gravity, to activate sensors.
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Marialuisa Capurso is a singer, performer, and researcher working in the fields of voice, movement, sound, and body art. Her practice combines performance, sound installation, participatory art, and collective research processes. She facilitates spaces for socially engaged artistic practices, develops sound installations, and leads research groups focused on body, breath, and voice exploration. She continues her training and research through somatic practices, body–mind approaches, and craniosacral disciplines, integrating these perspectives into her artistic, performative, and pedagogical practice.
Inneke Taal - ‘Breathing Choir - a voiceless articulation’
Through a collective reflection on the poetics of breath, Inneke Taal offers the ‘Breathing Choir’ as a group-devised performance that allows breath, as natural breathing and voiceless fricatives, to form the sonic and visual landscape of bodies in public space.
Beginning with developing a score related to breath and body, participants are invited to workshop this into a notional choir and take this choir into the public square as a collective act of breath. Taal considers this a way of holding a visual and subtly sonic space for voice through a voicelessness that allows an acoustic care to emerge through the present act of breathing and articulating without sound, together. Anyone with experience breathing is welcome.
The performance is coordinated to draw upon the sensitivity, body awareness and activation in Marialuisa Capurso’s ‘Opening, touching spaces’ workshop held prior and the dialogue between the artists.
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Inneke Taal is a visual artist who works with sites (architectural, environmental, social) as corresponding critical geographies. Working through language, bodies, sound, choreography, performance, video, movement and text, she is interested in drawing upon theatrical stagings of these geographical dialogues through improvisational approaches to exhibition making and collaboration.
Nunzia Picciallo – 'somatic practice, listening in movement'
With a somatic approach, guided movement, and sensory exploration, participants explore the body as a medium for perception and attunement. Movement as a mode of listening, expanding awareness of the self, and beyond toward the surrounding environment. By attending to subtle sensations, rhythms, and relations, this practice cultivates sensitivity to the continuous exchange between body, space, and atmosphere. The body is approached as a porous site of encounter, continuously shaped by and shaping its surroundings. Listening extends beyond hearing to encompass touch, movement, proximity, and the subtle affective qualities of an environment. Attention becomes a practice of relation while inhabiting the body with curiosity, openness, and care. No previous experience or skills are needed.
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Nunzia Picciallo is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, performer, facilitator active in international contexts. They develop an artistic practice that investigates the power structures that permeate corporeality and subjectivity, activating the body as a political device for analysis, deconstruction, and transformation. With a transdisciplinary approach, their practice and work moves amongst performance, dance, visual arts, and sound. Nunzia’s creations have been presented across various spaces and festivals in Europe, Asia, Central and North America, receiving various awards and recognitions. In parallel with their artistic work, Nunzia is engaged in facilitation and pedagogy, leading movement workshops that bring together dance professionals and individuals from diverse backgrounds both for institutional context and underground independent community spaces.