THE LISTENING BIENNAL
This edition of The Listening Academy aims to bring together
participating scholars, researchers and artists, to share knowledge,
practices, and research activities, and to collectively investigate
creative and critical questions of listening. Listening is emphasized
here as a transdisciplinary subject, one that moves across the
humanities and society, and which contributes to fostering interpersonal
and community relations. Listening is more than the hearing of audible
signals; rather, listening supports a range of relevant processes and
projects, including emotional growth, social recognition, attunement
across human and more-than-human worlds, co-learning, and decolonial,
eco-feminist initiatives. This is not to overlook the violations
listening can equally cause; rather, it becomes imperative to consider
the extent to which listening heals as well as harms, supports as well
as captures, thereby requiring greater critical and creative inquiry and
sensitivity. How might we think further about listening as a critical,
discursive field or modality? What forms of emergent practices can be
developed and deployed by way of listening, which may impact onto
current social, planetary challenges? What potentialities and
limitations does listening carry, and what might an acoustic literacy
offer in terms of contending with the ongoingness of colonial
(epistemic) violence?
The Listening Academy wishes to draw out these critical perspectives
through an transdisciplinary gathering of views from across the arts and
humanities, as well as from a diversity of communities. Integrating
individual presentation, lectures and collective group work with invited
guests, listening sessions and creative methods, the Academy adopts a
collaborative and collective approach, supporting a transversal sharing
of knowledge across theory and practice, thinking and doing. Through
individual and group reflection, the Academy will capture key
perspectives while opening toward areas of future work and
collaboration.
We invite participants to submit letters of interest to contribute to
the Academy. Please include a CV and a brief overview of your research
interests and / or ways of practicing. Letters of interest should be
sent by June 10, 2022, to: listeningaca@gmail.com
Convenors and organizers of The Listening Academy, London:
Lucia Farinati, curator, researcher and writer, co-author of The
Force of Listening (2017), and curatorial advisor for The Listening
Academy
Brandon LaBelle, artist, writer and theorist, author of Acoustic
Justice: Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation
(2021), and artistic director of The Listening Biennial
With contributions from invited guests including Leah Bassel, Arendse
Krabbe, Kate Lacey, Bhavisha Panchia, Blanc Sceol, among others,
including participants from past editions of the Academy.
The Listening Academy will be held at Iklectik, a creative platform
and space dedicated to experimental music and sound practices. Iklectik
is located in South London, as part of a compound of creative studios
and labs, allowing for a diversity of indoor and outdoor locations for
gathering and working together.