World of Echoes: On Cosmopoetic Listening – Madrid
World of Echoes: On Cosmopoetic Listening
The Listening Academy - Madrid
October 16 & 17, 2026 / 16:00 - 20:00
Location: Escuela Municipal de Música y Danza Maria Dolores Pradera (Friday) and Espíritu23 coworking space (Saturday)
Organized and facilitated by María Andueza Olmedo and Brandon LaBelle with the participation of Luis Guerra Miranda and María Salgado.
With the support of Acciones Especiales de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid AEUCM12/26.
Cosmopoetic Listening emphasizes poetic thinking and imagination as ways of connecting with the pulsating vitality of the world, its living agency, and matter's relationality in all its complexity. As a conceptual framework it takes guidance from traditions of poetic knowledge, which are positioned in contrast to modern scientific methods of objectivity and dissection. Rather, poetic knowledge is a subjective, sympathetic knowledge grounded in the senses, and lends to knowing by way of the inside. As such, knowing by way of a poetic consciousness is to recognize connections across subjects and objects, human and other-than-human; it is to adopt a position of admiration in contrast to analysis, opening onto paths of “cosmic connection”. As Gaston Bachelard proposes, “poetic imagination does not lead to society, but to the cosmos.”
Moreover, poetic knowledge follows from the distinction Hannah Arendt makes between “knowing” and “thinking,” where knowing is aligned with the search for truth and thinking instead with meaning and wisdom. For Arendt, the “will to know” has become a dominant force within human society undermining our ability to think freely. María Zambrano takes this a step further by introducing a subtle distinction between “thinking” and the “poetic”. Whereas thought tends to draw things into itself, “poetry” — or rather, the poetic — “is called to sing what is being born. And above all, what is born in contradiction to, and despite, all that surrounds it.” In this sense, the poetic brings together the freedom that Arendt associates with thinking and a will to resist, while opening up forms of relation that remain free from the stabilizing structures of thought.
It becomes important to question the dynamics of what we understand as “knowledge production” given the establishment of the knowledge economy as a prevailing system in which information and data function as forms of power and currency. As Achille Mbembe suggests, it’s imperative to invent a new form of “reason” against the logic of computation today. What kind of reason might this be? We’ll consider poetic reasoning as what may contribute to challenging dominant systems with their related forms of colonial-capitalist enclosure – finding in poetic knowledge a means for reclaiming a material-spiritual logic of connection and correspondence. To act poetically, as Fred Moten highlights, is to refuse to be settled, giving way to the invention of worlds.
We’re interested in exploring these perspectives by gathering different theoretical references as well as creative practices. This includes mapping a number of related methodologies experimenting with a cosmopoetic form of listening. Cosmopoetic Listening is posed as a trajectory of research which can contribute to thinking poetic knowledge today. Cosmopoetic Listening is a creative listening that recognizes a plurality of worlds, and that forms the basis for nurturing feelings of interdependency. As Éduoard Glissant has articulated, ways of overcoming histories of colonial violence are supported through a “poetics of relation” and made manifest in a “world of echoes” that is modern life.. These are echoes that interrupt borders placed between “us” and “them”, “self” and “other”, suggesting poetics as a path for figuring a multiplicity of identities and meanings.
Registration - Deadline October 1:
To participate please register by sending us an email to: listeningaca@gmail.com
Please include a short CV. We welcome the participation of a diversity of practitioners, researchers, educators and organizers, interested in sharing knowledge and exploring practices. Participation is free. Participants are responsible for their travel and accommodation. We anticipate that participants will join for the two-days. We also strive to create a safe and nurturing environment. Please share with us any particular needs you might have.
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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.
María Andueza Olmedo is an artist and researcher working on sound and listening. She is a professor of Design and Image at Complutense University in Madrid. In 2013, she established the artistic research platform 'Augmented Spatiality', focusing on listening, sound, and artistic processes related to the public sphere and community practices. As part of this project, she has organized exhibitions and cultural programmes in collaboration with artists, communities, and institutions, Since 2011, she has been part of the research and production team at RRS. Radio del Museo Reina Sofía, an institution with which she has collaborated on other initiatives concerning sound and listening within a mediation context. She was the sound designer for the video essays Seed, Image, Ground (2020) and LUMI (2024) by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka and also was responsible for the sound design in the central area of the Spanish Pavilion at the Osaka International EXPO (2025).
Luis Guerra Miranda is a visual artist and philosopher. He is currently a senior Researcher Ramón y Cajal at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) where he develops his work on Reparatory Art and Design Practices. He is also professor of artistic research at the Máster de Formación Permanente en Artes y Profesiones Artísticas at Escuela Sur, Círculo de Bellas Artes Madrid. Previously, he conducted his research work at the MIAS Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies, the Casa de Velázquez, the Autonomous University of Madrid, and the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. Additionally, he co-organized GOAP (Open Group of Political Art) at Arts Santa Mònica and has been associated with Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck) and the Post-foundational Thought Research Group at the University of Barcelona. His work as an artist has been exhibited worldwide in museums, art centers and galleries. His last book is titled El Gesto, la Traza y la Memoria, Palinodia Editores, Santiago of Chile, 2026. His research has received support of international institutions such as the Kone Foundation, Saastamoinen Foundation, Danish International Visual Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, among others.
María Salgado is an artist and poet who combines writing and scene in the pursuit of a sound that reconnects us with world and desire, with the desire of world. Her last poetry books are Lírica, Orientada a Stein, REKORD, and Salitre, and the essay El Momento analírico (Akal, 2023). She has presented solo performances in museums like MAC Montreal (De lengua Trois (three) pieces), WKV Stuttgart (Die 1, die eine 3 wurde), MACBA (Lírica/3) and Museo Reina Sofía (Let her try), along with many other cultural centers and autonomous venues in Spain, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, and the United States. In collaboration with music composer Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca she created the trilogy of stage works Jinete Último Reino, which toured in contexts such as Festival de Otoño or auawirleben Teaterfestival. With the prestigious XXIX Beca de Artes Visuales Fundación Botín, awarded along with Argentinian filmmaker Clarisa Navas, they shot the film Vía Versus. Faculty member of the Fine Arts School of Cuenca (UCLM), she is also part of the independent research group on language and crisis Seminario Euraca, based in Madrid, the city where she lives and creates.