The Listening Academy – Berlin Study Program
Listening Futures
The Listening Academy – study program Berlin
May – July 2026
We’re glad to announce a new edition of The Listening Academy. Under the heading Listening Futures, this edition of the Academy is planned as an extended study program structured around three physical meetings taking place in Berlin, along with online sessions, starting on May 18 and concluding on July 17.
We’re interested to bring together a collaborative group of peers to explore listening as a capacity which enables ways of building reparative futures: whether in acts that work at social change or that nurture forms of maintenance, taking care of community and the ongoing stories of place and people. Or further, that evoke particular collective imaginaries and that help in returning us to ourselves, in keeping close to personal and political affections essential for fostering generations to come – listening is positioned as a form of power and care that impacts onto holding a connection with the not-yet, specifically enabling ways of keeping grounded and in touch with the roots. While the study semester is directed at developing and reflecting upon listening itself as a creational gesture, we’re also concerned to follow listening into a range of critical issues – to develop practices and knowledges for manifesting the futures we long for. This will include developing a collective process, where we’ll work on modeling structures of listening, to ask ourselves: how can we institute forms, policies, and practices supportive of listening as an affirmative act? While listening is clearly understood to benefit a range of relationships and critical situations, in what ways is it given support across society as a whole? Where do we encounter listening practices, and how is it facilitated as a culture of reparative action? If listening is essential for sustaining connection and conversation, and aids in creating nonviolent futures, how do citizens learn to listen in ever-nuanced ways? And which includes instituting critical listening strategies and approaches, especially in terms of contending with how listening may also injure or violate?
To explore and develop these questions, throughout the Academy we’ll dialogue with specific initiatives and organizations, including Culture Sound Zone & Listen Research Group, Malmö University (Malmö), Khamoosh (Tehran), and MOCA NGO (Kyiv). These partnerships will allow for moving our work toward a consideration of civil society, thinking how listening can be integrated in institutional structures and community practices, especially so as to reshape “cultures of conflict” in positive, transformative ways. With particular focus on questions of sonic citizenship (acoustic politics and building sites of listening), sound heritage (archival sonic practices and listening into and across locality), and memorialization (attending to the stories of community and acts of futuring), we’ll consider listening’s role in fostering holistic, caring societies, lending to practices that contribute to change-work.
Each physical session is structured around a specific topic as well as input from invited partners. This will include lectures, reading seminars, creative testing and collective research, where we’ll model structures of listening, imagining how these may institute listening futures. In addition, each session will give room for participants’ research and practices, allowing for presentation and the sharing of individual work. A number of online sessions will also be organized throughout the duration of the Academy, to support the physical meetings, allowing for ongoing conversations along with critical input from invited guest artists and lecturers. Sharing, researching, modeling, the Academy will conclude around a set of methodologies and critical-creative propositions to be carried further into our individual contexts as well as future initiatives.
The study program is organized and facilitated by Brandon LaBelle with Giada Dalla Bontà and Elizabeth Gallón Droste, with online lectures from Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Mhamad Safa and Stephanie Loveless. In partnership with Culture Sound Zone & Listen Research Group, Malmö University (Malmö), Khamoosh (Tehran), and MOCA NGO (Kyiv).
APPLY: We welcome letters of interest from researchers, organizers, practitioners and educators curious to research together, and to contribute to developing listening futures. Participants can chose which of the physical sessions they would like to attend, deciding for only one of the weeks or all three. Each of the weeks will be organized around a daily schedule of activity which can be defined collectively.
In order to support greater accessibility, we kindly request a donation of 90 - 125 euro per week-long session, or 250 - 325 euro for attending all three. Please consider donating according to your own personal circumstances. All participants are invited to join the online sessions.
Please send letters of motivation, sharing details on your interest in the topic, along with a short CV by March 5, 2026; questions or inquiries can also be addressed to: listeningaca@gmail.com
Schedule:
1. May 18 - 22 (Berlin session) in partnership with Culture Sound Zone & Listen Research Group, Malmö University
On sonic citizenship: this describes the varied processes through which people create a sense of belonging by creating and experiencing sound and culture in different ways. Being a Sonic Citizen involves how we listen to others, but also who has the right to be heard. It also engages issues of inclusion and exclusion, such as how sound can be used to promote community with inclusive music making, but also how sound can lead to conflict in disputes about urban noise and sonic disturbance. Following the example of Culture Sound Zone, a former industrial area in the city of Malmö which has been designated a cultural space dedicated to urban music cultures as well as diverse community organizations, we’ll consider expressions of sonic citizenship and how this may influence understandings of social space. What are the defining qualities and attributes of sonic citizenship? If sound, music and auditory experiences are deep influences onto formations of identity, in what ways does this impact our social and political worlds?
2. June 15 - 19 (Berlin session) in partnership with Khamoosh
On sound heritage: while issues around heritage traditionally center around material cultures, increasing attention is given to immaterial expressions. Sound plays a vital role in shaping cultural traditions that impact national, communal and personal experiences. From village bells to seasonal festivity, from labor practices to mourning rituals, from music collections to media history, sound heritage is deeply embedded in cultural narratives, and which lend to both national and localized movements. The activities of Khamoosh are grounded in recording and archiving sounds found in the country of Iran, and which lead to a range of collective listening practices and initiatives. This has a particular focus on questions of the unheard, the unspoken, as well as the changing dynamics and turmoil of the country. We’ll dialogue with Khamoosh, learning from their research, their work, and their ways of approaching collective listening. Through listening into their archival work, issues around sound heritage will be elaborated, allowing for deeper recognition as to what’s at stake in acts of sounding, recording, listening.
3. July 13 - 17 (Berlin session) in partnership with MOCA NGO
On memorialization: processes of memorialization emerge across society in different ways. From official projects that address national events to immediate responses to the loss of life, memorialization is an important act and process that speaks to how communities carry as well as negotiate loss. Memorialization may also celebrate the spirit of people, reminding of acts of courage that can aid in times of crisis. These are all moments or processes that work at grounding our lives within a greater story of human survival and perseverance, that honor the past while also fostering versions of the future. And which often call us into forms of listening. Considering memorialization as a structuring gesture that garners social, political energies, and that works at building cultures of memory, we’ll dialogue with MOCA NGO, an organization in Kyiv working on establishing a new type of contemporary art museum in Ukraine. Bringing a focus to the contemporary art field in the country, the museum is increasingly concerned with supporting cultural projects that can help in building a future for the country and its cultural communities. This includes thinking how institutionally the project may aid in memorializing experiences of the war. Following their example, we’ll focus on thinking how artists act as witnesses, and how cultural institutions or initiatives navigate the complexities of memory. This will also allow for exploring listening methodologies as restorative and reparative, and as central to negotiating or transforming conflict.
*
Giada Dalla Bontà is a researcher, curator and writer focusing on the intersection between sound and art, with an emphasis on unofficial Soviet and post-Soviet cultures. She has worked with Lisson Gallery, Mondrian Foundation, HNI Rotterdam, Venice Biennale, as well as with independent art projects and experimental music labels. Currently she works at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen in association with the Sound Studies Lab.
Elizabeth Gallón Droste is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Spatial Cosmology at HafenCity University Hamburg. She weaves artistic research and anthropology through listening, speculative (non)fiction, moving images, sound, and site-based encounters. Her work navigates remediations and the (after)lives of extraction, engaging with socio-environmental conflicts and the echoes they leave behind, attuning to the entanglements of (im)materialities, minerals and waters, terrestrial and cosmological forces that shape planetary existence. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin (2024) with Voicing Rivers Atrato. Since 2022, she has been part of ~pes, an artistic duo exploring subterranean and interstitial worlds through sonic evocations. Since 2014, she has collaborated with communities in Germany and Colombia, activating audiovisual encounters, workshops, and site-based processes centered on fluvial ecologies. Elizabeth has participated at RAW Material Dakar (2024), Meandering by TBA21 Academy (2023), and documenta15 (2022). Her publications include the book Útica, Under the Murmuring Waters (Oreri, 2024).
Lucy Cathcart Frödén is a researcher, linguist and community artist, working primarily in music and sound. She is interested in creative collaboration, and how the act of making things together can foster solidarity and mutual care. Her research tries to understand how the radical openness that shared creativity requires can turn in-between spaces – between people, languages, cultures, academic disciplines or art forms – into common ground. Her PhD from the University of Glasgow was called Echolocations: exploring integration and the ethics of participation through collaborative songwriting. This practice-based, interdisciplinary research project involved working with people affected by the criminal justice system or the asylum system in Scotland, and was carried out with the support of several community organizations.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer 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: Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998–2002), Surface Tension (2003–2008), Dirty Ear Forum (2013–22), The Imaginary Republic (2014–19), The Living School (2014–16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017–), Communities in Movement (2019–23), among others. In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project. 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), and Background Noise (2006).
Stephanie Loveless is a sound and media artist whose research centers on listening, vocal embodiment, and place. Loveless’ sound, video, and performance work has been presented widely in festivals, galleries, museums and artist-run centers in North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East. She currently lives and works in upstate New York, on the shores of the Mahicannituck, where she is a Senior Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Arts, and Director of the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. In 2025, Loveless published A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros, which brought together a year's worth of daily scores for listening, contributed by over 300 artists. Her co-edited volume, Situated Listening: Attending to the Unheard (2025), is a collection of essays that contribute theories and practices of embedded, contextual, and critical listening to growing literature in the field of sound studies.
Mhamad Safa is a London-based sound artist and architect whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. His practice addresses the aural impacts of armed conflicts, shock and the aftermath of violence. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University in 2019 and received his PhD in Law from the University of Westminster in 2024. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architecture and Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London.
Partners:
Culture Sound Zone & Listen Research Group, Malmö University
Culture Sound Zone (Kulturljudzon) is a former industrial area in the city of Malmö which has been designated a cultural space where people can make more noise than would be permitted in other parts of the city. Acting as a hub for nightclubs, cultural associations, artist studios, and social initiatives from a diversity of communities, Culture Sound Zone remains a contested space, where a divergence of interests and conflict between the municipality, commercial and non-commercial cultural actors and property owners are currently playing out. In collaboration with NGBG, one of the area’s alternative non-commercial culture associations, and researchers at Malmö University, we’ll examine Culture Sound Zone through the lens of “sonic citizenship”, which describes the varied processes through which people create a sense of belonging by creating and experiencing sound and culture in different ways. Being a Sonic Citizen involves how we listen to others, but also who has the right to be heard. It also engages issues of inclusion and exclusion, such as how sound can be used to promote community with inclusive music making, but also how sound can lead to conflict in disputes about urban noise and sonic disturbance. Discussion partners include Dr. Hugo Boothby (School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University), Dr. Lucy Cathcart Frödén (Visiting Post-Doctoral Researcher, Malmö University), Iain Dace (NGBG Culture Association), Pia Lindroth (NGBG Culture Association).
Khamoosh
Khamoosh is a participatory transdisciplinary artistic research community that mediates conservation and restoration by exploring the sonic heritage of Iran through recorded sounds of everyday life; sounds less heard or even silenced. This process-based project aims to build an interactive archive of sounds and to exchange, resurrect, and decolonize these sounds using artistic methods. Our methodology is guided by an ongoing process of learning by doing, community-based participation, collective artistic practice, and research as a network. Following the work of Khamoosh, we’ll consider the issue of “sonic heritage”, considering how sound, acts of recording, and collective listening methodologies can shape forms of community building. Such considerations and processes are challenged by the particularities of the ever-shifting conditions and policies in the country of Iran, leading Khamoosh to develop methodologies or “code of conduct” as a living document and basis for solidarities of care. Discussion partners include Maryam Fazeli, pantea, and Golnoosh Heshmati.
MOCA NGO
NGO Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA NGO) is a non-profit organization based in Kyiv, founded in 2020 by Olga Balashova and Yuliia Hnat. Its mission is to establish a new type of contemporary art museum in Ukraine as a networked institution, significantly contributing to the development of the country’s art ecosystem, the preservation of cultural heritage, and the empowerment of communities and local artistic networks. MOCA NGO began developing assets for the future museum in 2021, focusing on institutionalization, knowledge production, education, and supporting governmental structures. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reinforced the organization's strategic direction, while part of its efforts were redirected toward supporting and strengthening the artistic community’s resilience and advancing Ukraine’s memory culture. Within international partnerships, MOCA NGO also contributes to addressing the strategic role of art in national security and international diplomacy, in a context where Russia not only destroys Ukrainian cultural heritage but continues to instrumentalize art as a means of influence, status, and financial leverage, through coordinated work on legal frameworks, ethics and advocacy in the global art market, the development of data infrastructure to track looted Ukrainian heritage and art assets linked to sanctioned Russian actors, and the strengthening of technological capacities of affected Ukrainian museums to ensure documentation, data processing, access, and continuity of cultural memory. Discussion partners include Olga Balashova and Yuliia Hnat.