Listening & Repair: Interview with Francesca Ceccherini

Brandon LaBelle: We’ve had the opportunity to meet and exchange over the recent years through the Listening Academy, and through your current research project “Co-listening: Sound Practices and Processes of Repair from the Indian Subcontinent”. Can you introduce yourself, and the current research you are developing? 

Francesca Ceccherini: Thank you, Brandon. It is a pleasure to reconnect with you here. For several years, I have been working as a curator and researcher. Within the context of my PhD, I have developed a practice-based research project dedicated to the intersection between sonic practices and processes of repair from a situated perspective. The research arises from an urgency to question and re-map the methodological frameworks through which we engage with artistic and curatorial disciplines, with the aim of contributing to the debates that animate them. The project was imagined as a space for reflection and an experiment in co-research, where different positions, epistemologies, and perspectives can emerge beyond Western and monodisciplinary frameworks.
 

At the heart of this research lies the ancient relationship between artistic practices and processes of repair, observed through contemporary languages that express themselves through sound and listening. Let me explain what I mean in more detail.

Since its origins, humankind has developed forms of repair with a fundamental purpose: to resist—resist extinction, loss, or death, for example. As philosopher Elisabeth V. Spelman (2002: 1) suggests, Homo sapiens may in fact be understood as Homo reparans— that is, a human being capable of discerning the value of what deeply matters to oneself, to others, and to the surrounding world, and therefore of engaging in reparative activity. Repair consequently assumes a strong ethical and affective dimension. It may manifest not only through physical forms of “mending”—even when these become, to some extent, symbolic of a deeper process, as in the Indian practice of rafoogari for repairing textiles or the Japanese art of kintsugi for repairing ceramics—but can also encompass actions and processes aimed at addressing internal wounds and seemingly intangible scars that form part of individual and collective histories. As artist and curator Kader Attia writes (2014: 92), “[i]n the evolution of the human species, ‘repair’ has emerged as an artistic and creative practice,” which he understands as “any form of creation that aims to improve a state of being and/or to transform a space/time of death into one of life.” In a present marked by neo-colonial and neo-imperial politics, approaching artistic and curatorial practices through their reparative potential means recognizing the civic, political, and spiritual roles they may assume in the lives of individuals and communities. Such practices can also contribute to recognizing the traumas that inhabit our present in latent forms, creating conditions in which they can be articulated, encountered, and potentially re-signified.
 

Within this framework, sonic practices offer a particularly vital ground for expressing forms of resistance and attempts at repair, especially where human beings are subjected to conditions of voicelessness and invisibility. At the same time, creating the conditions for listening can open up spaces of understanding and foster processes of inner, social, and even ecological mending, thereby creating the conditions for repair. Among the thinkers who have emphasized this relationship is conflict expert Farhana Sultana, whose work on epistemic injustice from a non-Western perspective is particularly relevant. She foregrounds the importance of cultivating practices of listening, referring specifically to deep listening and emphasizing the need to “learn from the Global South to understand how to read other cosmologies.” In a related direction, Indian artist and researcher Budhaditya Chattopadhyay¹ has worked to draw attention not only the existence of sonic practices emerging from the Global South—many of which have historically been excluded from dominant sound studies discourses—but also to question the very epistemological and methodological frameworks through which research questions are formulated and knowledge is produced.
 

The project Co-listening: Sound Practices and Processes of Repair from the Indian Subcontinent grows out of these reflections and from the desire to put them into practice. This has led me, over the past several years, to develop what I think of as a “constellation of listening”, built through ongoing encounters and exchanges with artists, curators, thinkers, and practitioners primarily based in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. It was through this constellation that, more recently, I spent two months undertaking residencies in Delhi, Kochi, and Bengaluru, where my exploration of sound and its capacity to carry and articulate memories of trauma across this vast and heterogeneous region became increasingly intertwined with the development of a curatorial practice grounded in co-listening.

Brandon: Your project brings together sound and trauma studies, addressing issues of listening and repair. What led you to these topics and concerns - and do you see possibilities for a curatorial approach to repair? 

Francesca: There are two paths that have led me to bring sound and trauma into conversation with one another. The first is my family history; the second is my work as curator and researcher, which over the past few years I have profoundly questioned. I grew up, almost unconsciously, practicing listening with my maternal grandmother. She was a seamstress who repaired torn clothes and fabrics. It was with me that she began to speak about her brutal history of deportation and survival—a history that had remained concealed within her body for more than forty years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she suddenly began to share this history with me, entrusting me with fragments of a memory worn and transformed by time. Through these fragments, she transmitted a profound history of extermination and loss, but also of extraordinary strength and resistance which, years later, I came to understand as something that had traversed generations. My grandmother endured many difficult moments throughout her life, yet she never ceased to communicate to me the importance of coexistence among different ethnicities and of recognizing diversity between peoples. Above all, despite the profound trauma she had experienced and the many hardships that followed, she never lost her joy in being alive, which remained with her until the age of eighty-seven. Her existence became fundamental to my own questioning of how I might draw upon this practice of listening and how I might place this inheritance of memory in relation to the present—as a means of understanding and recognizing other histories of colonial violence, other attempts at extermination.
 

This experience established within me a spontaneous relationship with trauma and profoundly shaped my curatorial practice: the ways in which I approach experiences of pain and their transmission across time, and the ways in which I observe, support, and present artistic gestures. Increasingly, I have sought to approach these questions not from a universalizing perspective, but through situated forms of knowledge and experience. Today, my curatorial approach is shaped as a means of cultivating listening: creating the conditions for listening to emerge, generate connections, and bring to light forms of awareness and vernacular knowledges that might otherwise remain unheard. In recent years, I have been exploring listening in its broadest sense—not simply as a process mediated by the ear, but as a sensory and embodied practice that can also occur through looking, tasting, touching, and through the vibrations that move through the body. Listening, understood in this expanded sense, can open spaces of resonance with the self, with others, with our surroundings, with invisible worlds, with histories and memories, and with possible futures. Such a process requires curation in the fullest sense of the word²: critical thinking, humanization, and the attentive creation of conditions in which listening can take place. This responsibility belongs both to those who listen and to those who create the spatial, temporal, and relational context in which listening becomes possible—a context often constrained and disrupted by regimes of power.³ In this sense, I believe that creating specific conditions of attentiveness can allow forms of repair to begin, take root, and, at times, unfold. Even what cannot be repaired can be listened to and acknowledged in its irreparability. Such recognition may become a resource from which processes of transformation can begin, extending across generations. In a present marked by totalitarian and neo-imperial political models, and by a 24/7 techno-capitalism that constantly fragments our attention, cultivating attentiveness becomes more urgent than ever. For me, listening is also a way of remaining present, and of allowing the invisible ruptures of our time to become recognizable. 

Brandon: You draw upon the concept of “co-listening” developed by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay. What does co-listening mean for you? 

Francesca: I think it is useful to begin by considering how co-listening raises a question about the subject as a listener, always in relation to others. For me, this goes beyond the idea of sharing a listening situation—of listening together, which can be a fundamental collective experience, as in demonstrations, political rallies, concerts, or religious services. Rather, co-listening is about listening through reciprocity and intersection. It means listening to oneself and to others, putting different forms of knowledge into dialogue, and allowing cultural backgrounds, bodies, environments, thoughts, and memories to meet. It means letting perspectives intersect and boundaries become more fluid, opening up the possibility of a more plural way of thinking. In Pauline Oliveros’s terms, this could perhaps be understood, at least in part, within the spectrum of quantum listening. When I first encountered the term “co-listening” within the field of sound studies in 2022, in the book Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues, I came across Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s idea of “critical co-listening” as a possible way of producing knowledge in relation to recent decolonial theories, as well as a form of resistance to dominant power structures. This idea resonated deeply with me. It opened up questions about how we might develop reparative pathways and put decolonial tools into practice, rather than producing yet another reflection from within exclusively Western frameworks. So, I began to ask how we could actually practice co-listening: how to make it happen, and how to develop ways of sustaining it beyond the duration of an event. These questions have accompanied me for the past three years, as I came to see that this practice could also have something to do with weaving things together and with repair. For me, repair as a practical form of curation and research requires longer-term projects and spaces, moving beyond a curatorial and academic model still shaped by inherited colonial hierarchies. It also means developing shared forms of leadership, redistributing resources, cultivating reciprocal perspectives, and, above all, listening to people, to the stories behind their practices, and to the contexts in which they live and act on a daily basis. This requires a decentered form of listening: not listening from a single center, but allowing multiple constellations to emerge. In this regard, Chattopadhyay describes co-listening as a vital “reciprocal and inter-subjective approach to situated listening”⁴, capable of addressing existing divisions by creating a more equitable space of recognition. The co-listening I have been experimenting with over these years certainly begins from here, but potentially extends into life as a whole: into how we cultivate our relationships, how we act within our worlds, and how we relate to our communities. In co-listening, the self is reshuffled, and unexpected things often emerge. This is why I think of co-listening as a transformative process that weaves multiplicity together and opens up possible processes of becoming. It is a methodology through which listening itself becomes an expanded “contested space”, as well as a space for constructing across difference. From this perspective, co-listening can also become a powerful way of de-escalating conflict, and a potential ally to peace studies and related practices. In this sense, it offers not only a model of attentiveness and “disarmament”, but also a reparative path capable of re-orchestrating the ways in which individuals and forms of life relate to one another.

Brandon: As part of your research you have spent time in India, learning from certain traditions and practices. Has there been a specific experience or encounter that has been particularly meaningful? 

Francesca: There are probably two encounters that have most strongly shaped the frequencies of my experience. One of them was my encounter with Kaur Chimuk, with whom I had the honor of developing a curatorial project through the methodology of co-listening. Chimuk is an artist-researcher exploring recent departures as a trans-binary person, working extensively across India and Bangladesh. Working together opened a space for co-research and co-writing in which the boundaries between what was mine and what was theirs constantly shifted, allowing words, horizons, perspectives, and awareness to emerge. This experience also allowed us to move beyond the rigidity of an academic research model still largely shaped by Western forms of knowledge, and to approach knowledge instead through attunement and resonance, within the slower rhythm of ritual time. In this process, we became mutual allies, and from it grew what we like to call the Co-Listening Ritual, a project that we continue to develop and nourish from our respective worlds. We later had the opportunity to share it at the Kochi Biennale, within Ibrahim Mahama’s installation The Parliament of Ghosts—a kind of monumental secular temple devoted to the question of colonial histories and repair. Here, we extended our co-listening, amplifying the voices…
 

My intimate and introspective encounter with Satish Sathyavrathan, who introduced me to and accompanied me in the ancient practice of yoga, opened another space of reflection, outside the fields of research and art. Through his teaching, I encountered an ancestral understanding of listening grounded in practice rather than theory: in waiting, slowing down, breathing, stillness, and attention, as well as in the interplay of different forms of listening. This gradually made me realize that what we understand today as listening practices is deeply rooted in some of the oldest human practices and ways of living, developed as ways of caring for the self in relation to other worlds and cosmologies. The resonance I found between yogic practice and the listening practices explored by sound studies over the past decades led me to think differently about these forms of knowledge, and about the millenary wisdom they carry. It also allowed me to reflect on how this same wisdom can still help us read and understand ourselves as beings endowed with a vibrational power that is potentially luminous and illuminating. At the same time, this encounter made me more attentive to the ways in which Indigenous and vernacular knowledge remains marginalized within academic discourse, and to the need to recognize them, as we should many others, as fundamental positions from which new dialogues can emerge. Satish, who from the very beginning met me with a profound sense of care, once told me that if I really wanted to understand sound, I would have to practice yoga. Through his generosity, I began to discover some of the deeper dimensions of listening and of sound itself, which, in his words, “is not always something audible.”