Call for Participation

This edition of The Listening Academy focuses on questions and practices of embodiment, and in what ways listening opens paths toward somatic engagement and research. How does listening affect the body and ways of attuning to embodied experiences? Moreover, how do different bodies listen? In what sense might listening provide a generative approach to thinking and feeling the body, as well as conceptualizing new perspectives on relationality? If listening is fundamental to nurturing empathy and sympathetic knowing, as well as attending to past experience, how might this enhance deeper attention to bodily health and healing?  

Following these first questions, the Academy aims at reflecting on listening as a bodily, sympathetic pathway and as the basis for movement strategies. This includes conceiving the body as a creative metabolism that is multiple and situated, and embedded within knowledge creation and relational know-how. Throughout the Academy, we’ll consider what becomes of situatedness by way of listening, and in what ways listening contributes to negotiating systems that demand bodies perform in particular ways. From empathic, sympathetic knowledge and the ethical movements and understandings listening affords, to the cultural and social logics that shape bodies and their positionality, the Academy will provide a time and space for nurturing critical-creative reflection and embodied experimentation.

Facilitated by researchers, artists and performers involved in sound studies, choreography, performative practices, voice and breath-work, we’ll think, speculate and share together, delving into concepts of listening and the body. We’ll also test ways of being in our bodies through exercises and experimentation involving breath and voice, dialogical encounter and shared attention, touch and tactility, to elaborate forms of sensing and working with bodily presence. Through such shared activity, we’ll search for ways to grow modes and forms of radical sympathy. 

Apply:

We invite letters of interest from a broad range of researchers and practitioners. 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. Please send us your materials by May 12, 2023, to: listeningaca@gmail.com

The Listening Academy Berlin is facilitated by Thiago Granato, Miriam Jakob, Brandon LaBelle and Nicole Michalla, along with invited guests. For participants there is a requested donation of 75 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.

The Listening Academy Berlin corresponds with the opening of The Listening Biennial, and the presentation of the performative-listening work The Open Body, on July 8 and 9.