The Listening Academy - Hong Kong

The Listening Academy – Hong Kong / 習聽為常

November 2 - 7, 2024

Organized and facilitated by soundpocket with Nigel Brown, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Catherine Clover, Viv Corringham, Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Brandon LaBelle, Law Yuk-mui, Israel Martínez, Hiromi Miyakita, Akio Suzuki

Listening as breath / 

This edition of The Listening Academy is offered as a form of retreat, where we may take a breath. Taking a breath works at assuaging situations of panic, bringing air into the lungs and calming anxiety – it is a remedy and a tactic for contending with heightened states of fright and flight. As Deb Dana suggests in her work on polyvagal theory, breath helps in reconnecting with the body. Such reconnection by way of breath is also found by way of listening, a listening that turns inward to attend to one’s body and all that it carries or is burdened by. To listen is to take a breath, anchoring oneself by way of slower rhythms and the pace of a listening-breath. These are remedies and tactics that work against the strain and stress of contemporary life, that contend with what is carried, to find in the folds of the body the stories and voices that may help in keeping connected. Listening keeps us in touch with the body in the body, the embodied intelligences passed down across generations, held in the blood and bone, and that guide us in knowing how to live well. To take a breath is to draw upon that knowledge.

The Listening Academy Hong Kong brings together international artists, performers, researchers, organizers and curators to explore listening as breath, and in what ways we can keep breathing well against the necropolitical realities today. This includes a soft program of intimate presentations, discussions and public encounters, moving from artist-run spaces and apartments to walks in the city as well as creative workshops on questions of air, breathing practices, philosophies of respiration, and translocality. We’re interested to elaborate ways of listening-breathing, testing out new remedies and tactics together.