Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

"and every star will blaze to guide their spirits home" 2025

"and every star will blaze to guide their spirits home" is a sound piece imagined by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni as a threshold time-space to welcome visitors to the third edition of The Listening Biennial. The piece is conceived as an extension to Ambient Thought(s), a podcast series they created for the online radio firefly frequencies, which reconfigures recordings of thinkers and artists through the lens of an experimental DJ remix where paths of thought suggest a particular blend of music and other sounds that in turn modify the rhythms and cadences of speech, giving rise to unpredictable resonances between the thinking voice and the shifting sonic atmosphere. For this piece, rather than focusing on one particular thinker, the artists have woven together a number of different voices in the astral spirit of thirdness and the forces that it summons, including Audre Lorde, Adania Shibli, Fred Moten, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Natalie Harkin, Trinh T Minh-Ha, Manthia Diawara, Pauline Oliveros, Homi Bhabha, Gloria Anzaldua, Raven Chacon and Stephen Muecke. These entangled threads of an emerging thought(s)-in-common coalesce and intertwine with the borderless sounds of John Cage, Fadi Tabbal, Kassel Jaeger, Eda Er, Samuel Reinhard, Haruna Higashida, Paul Jacob Fossum, Jay Dilla, Nikolaienko, Whitney Johnston & Lia Kohl, 400 Lonely Things, Natasha Barrett, Stephen Vitiello and Annea Lockwood.

Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni are filmmakers, artists and researchers whose work explores the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, the audible and what has been silenced. Focusing on the reactivation of lost, forgotten or silenced archives, narratives and histories, their practice includes film (both short and feature-length), mixed-media installations, soundworks, film-performances, radio shows and publications. In dialogue with literature, philosophy, music and science, their work is research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary, proposing new forms of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. Among their recent publications are b for the birds (Errant Bodies Press) and the vernacular technology “Dark Matter Cinema Tarot” (les presses du réel). In 2023 they opened The Word Clinic, a nomadic project that opens up a space to heal language collectively, and are preparing a "Glossary of Re-enchantment". They are co-founders of the radio platform firefly frequencies and are currently developing a new film project. Their works have been presented and installed in art spaces, museums and film festivals worldwide.