Open Call - The Listening Academy Goa
Can listening become a context-aware sensing act that takes place beyond the here and now to probe into historical complexities? The immediate navigational judgments we ascribe listening with may often reduce the potentialities of the listening act. Can we imagine listening as a slow, molecular process of attunement across self and others, which can support decolonial, relational, environmental, migratory and epistemological resonances to emerge? What begins as an expanded process of attuning across oneself and others may become a fertile base of empowerment and world-making activity. Listening is then not only a humanistic faculty of sensing within the context of everyday survival, but also a method for nurturing greater planetary co-existence with more-than-human others. Listening emerges as an embodied, ethical and critical capacity that can impact onto dominant structures and systems that work to exclude and extract, allowing for alternative practices.
The Listening Academy is a research academy aimed at investigating listening as a creative and critical practice, one that can assist in fostering greater relationality and mutuality, as well as co-learning and co-creation. In particular, this edition planned in collaboration with the Serendipity Arts Festival focuses on the inaudible, and how listening enables an engagement with the unheard, the silent, the forgotten, the repressed. The inaudible is highlighted as an emptiness at the center of the sensible. Listening will be activated as a negative methodology for approaching that which resists capture but also refuses to go away: from personal and collective memory to the invisible systems impacting futures, from disappearing planetary life to hidden social worlds, the Academy will open a space for collective research and creative engagement with inaudibility and the unheard.
Emphasizing the potentiality of listening as a practice and method, the Academy invites participants to join for a week-long workshop where we’ll discuss, explore, listen and attune to questions of inaudibility. This will include an exchange of knowledge and practices through lectures from invited guests, reading and listening sessions, as well as collaborative material investigations and situated field work in Goa, given its historically enriching acoustic territories.
FACILITATORS
The workshop is convened and facilitated by internationally renowned artists and scholars:
• Brandon LaBelle – author of Acoustic Justice (2021), Sonic Agency (2018), Background Noise (2015), and artistic director of The Listening Biennial.
• Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – author of The Auditory Setting (2021) and The Nomadic Listener (2020), visiting professor at IXDM Basel, and founder of Sound Across.
• Other invited guest artists and musicians.
STRUCTURE
• The days will be structured around morning seminars followed by group investigations in the afternoon, with a focus on fieldwork in the area through listening walks.
• Concentration will be given to probing relations between sound, listening, decolonial thoughts, and gestures of reciprocity.
• On a number of evenings, we will also plan to sing and sound together, using the setting of the festival in Goa as a free experimental space for hanging out, bringing our sensate ears into a collective activity of walking and listening, and situated practices of sonic (auto) ethnographies.
• There will also be evening events at the festival in the form of public interventions, performances, temporary exhibitions and collective writings for a publication.
KEY INFORMATION
Deadline: September 15 @ 11:59pm IST
Workshop dates: December 15 – 23, 2023
Venue: Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa
ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA
• We welcome applications from a broad range of artists and researchers, including anyone interested in sound, listening, sound arts and experimental music.
• A bachelor or master degree in the arts, or extended experience in creative practice and research, is preferred.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
• Applicants will have to make their own arrangements for travel and accommodation during the festival in Goa
• Applicants are requested to upload their documents on a Google drive with open access and share the link in the application form.