Lílian Campesato, Agustín Genoud, Kirstin Burckhardt

Lílian Campesato 

“Listening to the Territory”
Cracolândia, Boca do Lixo, downtown São Paulo. Walking through the damp, dirty streets of this territory, shopkeeper Nise Rocha reveals a lesser-known reality, showing that the people who live there are far more than the usual stereotypes of drug users, dealers, and police. Featuring testimonies from residents, artists, and local agents, Listening to the Territory gives voice to the intense human relationships and the complex context of those living on the margins of society—people whom few are willing to listen to.

Credits:
Concept: Lílian Campesato and Valéria Bonafé
Testimonies: Aline Cristina Rodrigues (MC Docinho), Átila Fragozo, Carmem Lopes, Danee Amorim, Ivanise Rocha (Nice), and Laurah Cruz
Video creation, editing, and montage: Otavio Sousa
Sound editing and mastering: Paulo Assis
Video editing: Pedro Martins
Music: MC Docinho (Aline Cristina Rodrigues) and DJ Zazá (Isaías Barbosa)

Lílian Campesato (1981) 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.

Agustín Genoud

The performance is a visceral blend of robotic and animalistic vocal scenes that overwhelms the senses. Drawing on self-made contemporary extended vocal techniques, beatboxing, heavy metal and guttural singing, alongside analogue and digital live processing systems, it musicalises the other side of our post-ecological cyberpunk present. A contemporary songbook for the shadows of our world's margins.

Agustin Genoud, Performer, musician and academic in the fields of contemporary voice and posthumanism. I build systems and design processes that expand and transform vocal production. I produce expanded voice techniques that modulate and interfere with the sounds humanly assigned to the vocal tract through machinic and animalistic gestures. I facilitate collective spaces such as workshops and practices on processes of dehumanization of the voice and vocal and sound deterritorialization. 

Kirstin Burckhardt

“Anamnesis”

“Anamnesis” is a performance by artist and psychologist Kirstin Burckhardt. It invites the people present into a collective recollection of their automythographies. Quoting biographical questions used in psychotherapy, Burckhardt opens another context for mapping one‘s own narrative. 

Kirstin Burckhardt (b. in South Africa) is a visual artist and psychotherapist combining video and performance with sound and spoken word. Critically drawing upon her training in psychology and neuroscience, her practice addresses power dynamics intertwined with the body. Continuously questioning what defines a “body”, her artistic research focuses on interpersonal space as a place for negotiating sensitivity, conflict, empathy, transgenerational trauma, and the complexities of healing. She studied Fine Arts in Hamburg, Lyon, and Hangzhou. Simultaneously, she graduated in psychology at the University of Hamburg and is working as a clinical psychotherapist in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions at KINDL Berlin-Centre for Contemporary Art, KAI10|Arthena Foundation, Deichtorhallen/Sammlung Falckenberg Hamburg, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, and the Goethe Institut Sofia (BUL) and LA (USA). She has collaborated closely with performing and visual artists from China, Sweden, and Colombia and has received grants e.g. by the Fonds for the Performing Arts (Fonds Darstellende Künste), ifa (Institut für Foreign Affairs), and Hamburg’s ‘Arbeitsstipendium’ (working grant).

*

For its third edition, The Listening Biennial brings together sonic, visual and performative works by an international cohort of artists for a week-long program of collective listening. Aiming to foster experimental, restorative practices, The Listening Biennial offers a hospitable, participatory space for deep breaths and slow talk, and for listening-with the vibrant matters of our planetary world. Comprised of audio works and artistic installations presented throughout the building of Ballhaus Ost, informal talks taking place under the trees, and an evening program of live performances and experimental sounds, we invite audiences into a listening journey full of poetic voices, stories, noises and songs. 

More on the full program at Ballhaus Ost.

And further details on the Listening Biennial 2025 program.