Call for Participation – The Listening Academy Berlin
The Listening Academy – Berlin
Dates: September 2 - 6, 2025
Location: Ballhaus Ost, Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berlin & Errant Sound, Gerichtstrasse 45, 13347 Berlin
Organized and facilitated by Lílian Campesato, Christiane Hommelsheim, Brandon LaBelle, and ~pes (Elizabeth Gallón Droste & Pablo Torres Gómez).
In their work on personal and collective repair, Jessica Benjamin poses the idea of the Third as a deeply relational, ethical model which emphasizes mutuality and co-creation. For Benjamin, the Third names an intersubjective and interdependent process for building collaborative, restorative journeys. By way of the rhythms and reasons of the Third, a dynamic of shared agency is nurtured. In particular, the Third is marked by a commitment to each other, shaped by recognition of uneven power relations and structural violences as well as a belief in reparative action. Considering Benjamin’s highly evocative relational model, in what ways does the Third suggest a particular form of listening? If the Third operates as a process of mutual co-creation, holding a time and space for recognition of injury and the possibility of repair, does it necessitate a unique form of listening, one that contributes to the work of change?
In reflecting upon the urgencies and potentialities of mutuality, this edition of The Listening Academy poses Third Listening as a creative, critical framework. Third Listening is emphasized as a generative form of listening that supports restorative process. Third Listening is about fostering care and concern by acknowledging individual histories and cultural viewpoints while challenging us to listen out for the unheard and the marginalized as well as new paths of connection. As Homi Bhabha suggests through his concept of Third Space, the cultural encounters provoked by colonial modernity forcibly stagger fixed identities, giving onto liminal scenes which unsettle dominant structures and narratives. These are spaces and scenes that invite plurality and ways of hearing the cacophony of a troubled world.
Third Listening is offered as an invitation to explore together how we may listen-with troubled realities, suggesting a shift from a language of mastery to one of situated collaboration, from a culture of independence to an ethics of interdependency as well as a focus on reciprocity. This includes acknowledging how listening is strained by current violences and struggles. If the Third is posed as a means for holding a connection to others as Benjamin suggests, what creative, critical resources or practices does this entail?
Exploring Third Listening through a range of theoretical reflections, shared stories and material testings, we’ll work at cultivating practices of reciprocity so as to engage the intersubjective and interdependent as the basis for maintaining a collective world. This will integrate a number of areas of focus, including: explorative methods of voicing as a means for attuning to our individual and collective bodies (posing the concept of a Third Voice); elaborating ideas and gestures of social listening and how we may attend to the stories of others, cultivating methods of collaboration sensitive to the particularities of place and people (relating to the topic of narrative hospitality). From somatic resonance and sounding vocal bodies to engaging the worlds of others, we’ll further explore Third Listening as ecologically-oriented, where connections with the more-than-human can be elaborated (extending ideas of Third Space toward Gilles Clément’s concept of Third Landscape, as interstitial zones of planetary, biological flourishing).
The Academy will be structured so as to invite individual practices, stories and dreams, as well as collective activity, which can enhance creative and critical work. We’ll compile ideas and reflections as well as ways of working, delving into Third Listening as a speculative arena and reparative, restorative process. Through sharing in this listening journey together, we aim to bring collective energy, care and hope to our current times.
Apply:
We welcome letters of interest from a diversity of practitioners, researchers, educators and organizers, interested in sharing knowledge and exploring practices. Please share with us your interest in participating, along with what interests you about listening: what is listening for you and how does it relate to your research and practice? Along with a letter of interest, please include a short CV. For participants there is a requested donation of 90 euro, which will help in providing material and technical support. Participants are responsible for their travel and accommodations. We also strive to create a safe, nurturing and enriching environment. Please share with us any particular needs you might have. Please send us your materials by July 1, 2025, to: listeningaca@gmail.com
The Listening Academy Berlin is facilitated by Lílian Campesato, Christiane Hommelsheim, Brandon LaBelle, and ~pes (Elizabeth Gallón Droste & Pablo Torres Gómez). It is being organized in the context of The Listening Biennial 2025, which will be occurring at the same time as the Academy. The Biennial includes a public program of live performances, exhibited works and related talks, which Academy participants are invited to attend.
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The Listening Academy is an independent research academy focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social and somatic issue. This entails a relation to sonic, performative and ecological practices, sound studies research, community work and experimental pedagogy. The Academy offers a generative and nurturing framework for researchers and practitioners to engage in collaborative exchange and the sharing of knowledge, as well as workshopping new directions. This includes bringing together individual approaches and work, and creating opportunities for material exploration and building new collaborations.
Lílian Campesato is a Brazilian artist and researcher. Her practice combines reflective work and inventive actions involving sound, listening, art, and performance. Holding a PhD from the University of São Paulo, her scholarly work explores the politics of listening, focusing on gender and its subjective dimensions. She critically examines hegemonic discourses in experimental music and sound art. Campesato has presented her work as a sound artist and performer at festivals and exhibitions in Brazil and internationally. Since 2017, she has developed the research project “Microfonias: intention and sharing of listening" in partnership with Brazilian composer and researcher Valéria Bonafé. Their most recent work was the project "Dis-inhabiting Listenings: Listening in Dispute in Crackland", which engages participatory artistic actions to critically reflect on an urban landscape marked by deep inequalities and to explore new ways of listening to its people, places, and tensions. Currently, Campesato has been awarded a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship to be developed at the University of Copenhagen starting in 2025.
Christiane Hommelsheim studied video and performance art with Ulrike Rosenback at the HBK Saar in Saarbrücken, and spent a semester at DASARTS in Amsterdam. She has been a certified voice teacher at the Roy Hart International Art Center in France since 2009, as well as being certified in Perceptive Pedagogy (Methode Danis Bois). She gives private lessons, voice coaching for dance and theater productions and workshops at home and abroad. Since her participation in the SPCP "The Runner" by Deborah Hay, perception as a performative practice is a central topic in her work. Since 2010 she collaborates with the composer Ralf Haarmann as duo haarmannhommelsheim. In 2018 they released the CD "Die Umrandung des Nichts", and in 2020, with Australian composer David Young, Hommelsheim created the performance "Sarah Bellam in Christiane’s very own Truck Show" and installation "Sarah Bellam in Animal Documentaries". In 2021 she presented the installation "Since when are you in this state?" (64 reel to reel tapes of psychiatric conversations) at Museum St. Wendel, Germany. Currently she focuses on a video series, "Random Beauty", with music by haarmannhommelsheim.
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: 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 (2013-21), 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. He is the author of Poetics of Listening: Inner Life, Social Transformation, Planetary Practices (2025), Acoustic Justice (2021), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
~pes is a collaborative artistic research process between bogotá-born and berlin-based elizabeth gallón droste and pablo torres gómez. Through site-specific investigation, ~pes evokes multimodal encounters with the interspecific weave we are part of, enacting partial encounters with divergent temporalities and beings in processes of becoming. The process questions and exceeds conventional, close-ended representations of planetary ecologies, fostering attunements to the murmurous and subterranean worlds that constitute them. These collective encounters and imaginative processes take the form of sound walks, listening sessions, installations, written texts and sonic releases.