Wild Listening
Developed in the context of The Listening Academy held in Basel in 2023, the collection of audio works by participating artists responds to the concept of wild listening. Including works by Verica Kovacevska, Therese Naess Diesen, Hannah Mackaness, Juliana Espana Keller, and Junying Wu.
Over the course of the Listening Academy taking place at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, we immersed ourselves in thoughtful and open discussions, sharing individual practices and research, and thinking together around the topic of wild listening: in what ways might listening assist in fostering new paths of connection with planetary others? Can our listening and sounding practices attune more intimately and more profoundly with the materialities that surround and that equally inhabit our own bodies? Following these lines of questioning, among others, we also took walks, touching plants, dirt, buildings; we recorded locations, winds, planting sensors here and there, and tracking what Gilles Clément terms third landscapes: the rewilded zones often nestled amongst urban grids. Wild listening also became about rewilding ourselves, our imagination, our listening, so as to embrace the unexpected and the unpredictable as partners in the adventure of listening together and alone. Along the way, stories began to emerge, drawings, mappings, which led to creating compositions, guided walks and meditations, performative listenings, placed within the environment surrounding the Media Lab, and which have been reworked into this collection of audio pieces.