The Listening Academy - Lisbon
The Listening Academy – Lisbon
January 19 - 22, 2026
On Elemental Collaboration
Following current concerns for greater planetary awareness and engagement, this edition of The Listening Academy aims to bring focus to ideas and practices of elemental collaboration. This entails developing research and reflections on what constitutes the elemental and its fundamental presence today. From the air in our lungs, the water in our bodies, to the earth in our bones, the fire in our hearts, the elemental is highlighted as foundational to human vitality as well as a crucial means for sensing and storying planetary coexistence. To engage these critical concerns, we’re interested to animate this living interdependency by opening an explorative space for experimental gestures of attunement and collective sharing which can aid in upsetting and reorienting dominant forms of human exceptionalism. In what ways might we cultivate practices of reciprocity, to give expression to what Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer highlights as a “grammar of animacy”?
Guided by invited artists, researchers and organizers, the Academy sets out to collectively cultivate a grammar of animacy. Organized around a set of daily journeys into elaborated forms of sensing and synchronizing with surrounding environments and voices, we’ll collect methodologies and imaginings, elaborating the potentiality of elemental collaboration. This includes a focus on geology and the seismic, radio and electromagnetism, site-sensitivity and situated fieldwork, elemental ghosts and water bodies. Through enlivening connections with the elemental, we’ll work at fostering a grammar of animacy, mapping diverse approaches which can contribute to planetary practices.
Inviting entanglements across discrete matter and vibrant energies, tangible entities and diffuse vapors, visible forms and invisible forces, concrete structures and atmospheric pressures, we’ll listen-with the local environment as an expression of a greater elemental world. This includes an engagement with the politics of the elemental today, and how the ongoingness of colonial capture destroys ecological flourishing and the lives of many. Moreover, we're concerned to think how elemental collaboration can be integrated within institutional structures: what would an institutional practice be that gestures toward a grammar of animacy? Can we conceptualize a form of biopoetical power in support of holistic forms of reconnection?
This edition of The Listening Academy is envisioned as a hospitable coming together by which to gather individual concerns and practices, questions and rhythms, to cultivate together an animating form of listening.
Participating guests and facilitators include anna andrejew, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Monaí de Paula Antunes, Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Taru Elfving, Pablo Torres Goméz, Brandon LaBelle, Margarida Mendes, Luísa Santos.
Location: CAM - Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian. Organized in the context of Institution(ing)s, on innovating sustainable institutional practices.
The Listening Academy Lisbon is an open event. We welcome the participation of interested researchers, practitioners, organizers, educators and more. The Academy is structured through a daily program of guided activities and sharing. We welcome participants to attend one or more days. Capacity is limited. Please register here, sharing a few details on your own practice and interests in the topic:
Schedule (more details to follow):
January 19, 19:00: Opening event, with presentations by Taru Elfving, Brandon LaBelle and Oficina de Autonomia
January 20, 10:00 - 17:00: Explorative reading and discussion on Elemental Collaboration, with a focus on geological sensing and the seismic, with Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Pablo Torres Gómez (~pes), plus listening session with Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano focused on water and data materialities
January 21, 10:00 - 17:00: Counter-mapping and collective tending practices with anna andrejew, plus workshop on electromagnetism and radio as elemental force, with Monai de Paula Antunes / evening program: 18:00 book launch at Tigre del Papel, The Listening Biennial Reader, vol. 2: On Infralistening, with Brandon LaBelle, Luisa Santos, Margarida Mendes
January 22, 10:00 - 17:00: Workshop on water bodies and vibrational currents, with Margarida Mendes, plus final reflections and group sharing: toward listening elementally
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anna andrejew is an artist–researcher with a background in ethnography and permaculture. Her work begins with the question of how we live together in contemporary society. Through a slow, often ritualistic practice, she invites contemplation in a time marked by speed, grief, and loss—attuning to ecological processes, relational dynamics, and the unfolding rhythms of place. Drawing on her exile heritage and material research, anna approaches art as a space to explore alternative ways of living and belonging—through practices of sharing, care, and self-organization. She works with the physical, emotional, and material dimensions of space, particularly those in-between or undefined areas that resist fixed interpretation. Her site-responsive interventions and long-term processes of experimentation—using listening, countermapping, papermaking, (cameraless) photography, writing, and collective tending—explore how spaces and relations co-emerge, transform, and sustain one another. Projects remain open-ended, unfolding in dialogue with site, participants, and temporal rhythms. Recent projects include Be Like Water (funded by the Dutch Research Council), The Memory of Matter (ACPA/KABK), Counter-mapping the Garden (West, The Hague), and the publication The First Impression on Your Skin (2024). She is also actively involved in several commons-oriented initiatives and community-based practices.
Monai de Paula Antunes is an artistic researcher, media & transmission artist and experimental radio-maker. She is co-founder of Radio Otherwise and Archipel Stations Community Radio. Her work engages with the rich materialities and multiple cultural traditions of radio, drawing attention through them to peripheral manifestations of cybernetics and ecology. Presenting itself as infrastructural, her practice decentralises and connects by producing participatory and low-tech interactive artworks, but also through the reforming and interweaving of things as an art form. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Bauhaus University Weimar in the Arts and Design Department, holding a Heinrich Böll Stiftung full doctoral research scholarship, with the project “Radio Gardening with quilombola horticultures: an investigacción-acción of natureculture relationships”. She has been awarded the Villa Romana Fellowship and the DAAD short-term scholarship in 2024, and the Elsa-Neumann Fellowship in 2022. She has exhibited in places such as SAVVY Contemporary, Instituto INHOTIM, Floating University, Onassis Stegi, transmediale, CTM Festival, European Media Art Festival, Ars Electronica and others.
Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano is an artist, writer, and educator who investigates the encounters between ecology, technology and mysticism, crafting bridges to sense the interdependence between the visible and invisible. Based on transdisciplinary research on water ecologies, technical infrastructures, telepathy, and fermentation, he has developed audiovisual, sonic, editorial, edible, and pedagogical projects, often learning and collaborating with others. Juan Pablo has worked with the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Paisanaje, Espacio Odeón, Plataforma Bogotá, and Escuela de Garaje (laagencia). He has also taught at the Javeriana and Andes Universities in Colombia, the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, and Elisava Madrid. His work has been presented at Momentum 13 (Moss), Matadero (Madrid), Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen), Manifesta 15 (Barcelona), Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), La MaMa (New York), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), ISEA (Barcelona), Transmediale (Berlin), Galería Santa Fe (Bogotá), Museo Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), among others.
Taru Elfving is a Helsinki-based curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. As director of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago she currently leads a research residency programme on the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute, University of Turku (FI). She is also a curatorial researcher in the transdisciplinary Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science (SOS) at Åbo Akademi University (FI). She has published internationally and co-edited publications such as Contemporary Artist Residencies. Reclaiming Time and Space (Valiz, 2019). She holds a PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London (UK).
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Academy. 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 (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-21), 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. He is the author of Poetics of Listening (2025), Acoustic Justice (2021), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).
Margarida Mendes holds a phd in Research Architecture by Goldsmiths University of London. She is a researcher, curator, artist, and educator, exploring the overlap between critical ecology, research methodologies, sound practices and ecopedagogy. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions and experiential works where alternative modes of education and sensing practices may catalyse political imagination and restorative action. She is a tutor in the geo-Design Masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven and a member of Natural Contract Lab, a transdisciplinary collective of lawyers and artists working on restorative justice and nature rights across Europe.
~pes is a collaborative artistic research process between Bogotá-born and Berlin-based Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Pablo Torres Gómez. Through site-specific investigation, ~pes evokes multimodal encounters with the interspecific weave we are part of, enacting partial encounters with divergent temporalities and beings in processes of becoming. The process questions and exceeds conventional, close-ended representations of planetary ecologies, fostering attunements to the murmurous and subterranean worlds that constitute them. These collective encounters and imaginative processes take the form of sound walks, listening sessions, installations, written texts and sonic releases.
Luísa Santos Ph.D in Culture Studies by the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance, in Berlin, and m.a. in Curating Contemporary Art by the Royal College of Art, in London, Luísa Santos is an Assistant Researcher, in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies, since 2016 at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. An independent curator since 2009, she conducted research in curatorial practices at the Konstfack, in Stockholm, in 2013; since 2019, she is a research fellow at The European School of Governance (eusg), in Berlin; and, since 2023, she is a teaching fellow at the Europaeum, in Oxford. She is the artistic director of the 4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, the Arctic Routes, Southern Ways, and the Institution(ing)s.