The Listening Academy – Cairo
The Listening Academy - Cairo
September 1 - 4, 2026
On Cosmopoetic Sound
In the book, Sounds Wild and Broken, David Haskell maps the ways in which sound underpins the emergence and evolution of living matter, where cosmic pulses have come to shape celestial bodies. This is elaborated by recognizing the deep connection between sound and movement, vibration and the living: the hair-like cilia of the inner ear carries this fundamental connection, reminding how hearing and movement, balance and orientation, are expressive of a primary acoustic force key to material vitality.
Considering this biological, material significance, this edition of The Listening Academy explores sound as an animating, energetic force, one that passes through bodies, environments, worlds and things. As such, sound is often that medium which connects the terrestrial and the divine, the vibrational and the transmitted, daily struggles and cultural movements, leading to deep and enduring meanings. This includes an appreciation for sound as what comes to indicate or manifest a “culture of life”, lending to conditions that honor and support livability: to be sound is to feel well, and to sense when things are out of balance or injured.
Following understandings of sound as animate force, and as what supports a culture of life, the Academy opens a collaborative framework for investigating sound as a practice of vitality. Through creative, critical discussions and collective material investigations, we’ll bring sound to life, following it as a means for challenging the prevailing logic of “necropower” today. As Achille Mbembe argues, an “ideology of death” defines much of the political world, where exclusion, discrimination, violence and war are normalized. Against such a logic, we’ll listen into and with sound as a Cosmopoetic Being whose vibratory, resonant, and noisy nature emerges as a carrier of vitality: as what animates and holds stories of resistance, communal bonds, struggles for freedom and embodied memory. By way of such a focus, sound is considered an important contribution to wielding what Amitav Ghosh calls a “vitalist politics” in support of life. While sound may certainly harm and hurt, we’ll attend to it as a force of vitality, one that can teach of the cosmic thunders, the social currents, and the radical sympathies shaping relations.
Organized and facilitated by Sara Hamdy, Brandon LaBelle, and invited guests (tbc).
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 details on your own practice and research, along with a short CV. Participation is free. Participants are responsible for their travel and accommodations. We also strive to create a safe and nurturing environment. Please share with us any particular needs you might have. Please send us your materials by August 1, 2026, to: listeningaca@gmail.com
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.
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Sara Hamdy is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and curator with a profound passion for sound research and archiving. Her artistic practice revolves around sound exploration as a contemporary art form, utilizing a diverse range of mediums including installations, texts, sounds, drawings, participatory interventions, and pedagogical performative acts and situations. In 2020, she founded the “Sonic Spaces” project, an online archival platform dedicated to documenting and promoting sound studies and creative sonic endeavors in Egypt, while her practice investigating communication, language, the non-linear narrative of space, and time, aiming to uncover the underlying dynamics of both tangible and intangible systems, imagining unique spaces and emphasizing the subjective aspects of the environment.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist 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 (2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), 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. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), among others.