Sounding – Listening: Artistic Research as Resistance and Reverberation

Histories of oppression and environmental destruction have shaped what we hear and what remains unheard. Today’s regimes of power perpetuate the problem, muting the voices of exploited humans and other-than-human beings. As argued by authors such as Frantz Fanon, bell hooks and Sylvia Wynter, epistemologies of the Global North equate knowing and control with visuality, discrediting senses such as hearing, smelling and tactility. This "ocularcentrism," reinforces racialized and colonial ways of perceiving the world.

In this event we will combine practical and conceptual work to approach the problem. Guided by artist researchers, we will practise listening in new ways to the life of the earth, and the lives marginalized by colonial and capitalist systems. By tuning in to alternative sensory modalities we hope to open up more nuanced, reciprocal relationships with our environments, and those rendered invisible or inaudible by dominant power structures.

We will also experiment with concepts that are under-developed in critical work. Our vocabularies are rich with visual concepts such as ‘illuminate’, ‘regard’, and ‘reveal’, but we tend to underuse terms deriving from sound. What could it mean to undertake artistic research with reference to terms such as echo, heterophony, reverberation, amplify, tuning-in, or un-muting? How can new concepts shift our thinking and our listening? And how could this affect the social dimensions of our work, its ‘repercussions’?

The day begins with a deep listening workshop, which will be followed by three presentations by artist researchers who are working with sound, music and movement, and their broad resonances in the world.

• 10.30-12.30 | Morning session: Deep Listening Workshop

How can listening activate somatic and ecological co-creation? How can sounding induce subtle or slow transformations? In the face of the multiple ecological crises of the Anthropocene, we often encounter a crisis of imagination. This workshop invites participants to “auralize” instead as a means of sonically exploring new possibilities through listening. Led by Deep Listening practitioner Feli Navarro, this workshop will combine listening exercises with movement, and develop collective responses to text scores by Pauline Oliveros. Building on these experiences, participants will co-create their own text scores to share and perform with the group.

• 12:30-13:00 | Break

• 13:15-16:30 | Afternoon sessions – 30-minute participatory presentations followed by Q&A

Welcome by Wayne Modest and Rachel Beckles Wilson

1. 13:15-14:00 | Feli Navarro

Reverberation and ecological listening in performance:

Sharing his study into embodied and intra-active relationships with stones, Feli will invite listeners to engage in lithic and choreographic reverberations, exploring their affective, material, and agential potential. He will build upon Lithic Choreographies, an artistic research project that investigates human-stone entanglements, considering stones as active co-creators. By examining stones as conductors of time, transformation, and mobility, the research questions the rigid, extractive views of the lithic and advocates for a posthuman, eco-performative approach, encouraging a rethinking of human-nonhuman interconnection in response to the climate crisis. This presentation will delve into ecological and (deep) listening methodologies as propositions for performance-making, with some hands-on experiments.

Q&A led by Stefan Schäfer and Carlo de Gaetano

2. 14:00-14:45 | Rachel Beckles Willson 

Heterophonia and generative processes in knowledge creation:

Sharing her work on decoloniality, Rachel will facilitate multi-vocal encounters with the oud, the most treasured musical instrument of the Arab world.

Q&A led by Tara Karpinski

• 14:45-15:15 | Coffee & tea break

3. 15:15-16:00 | Satch Hoyt 

Un-Muting: Unlistening for Listening:

Satch will share his process of Un-Muting, a form of sonic restitution of musical instruments held silently in museums, thereby unlocking pasts, presents and futures of sound and listening.

Q&A led by Sophia Bardoutsou, Philippine Hoegen & Risk Hazekamp

4. 16:00-16:30 | Closing conversations

• 16:30-17:30 | Reception in museum lounge

Satch Hoyt, born in London of British and African-Jamaican ancestry, is currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. He makes sculptures and installations accompanied with sound, as well as paintings and drawings. His current works mine what he terms the Afro Sonic Signifier – he argues that this mnemonic network of sound is a primary element that has kept the transnational African Diaspora intact. Through research of African diaspora histories, mythologies and cosmologies he employs a plethera of materials such as boxing gloves, raw cotton, police batons, drum sticks, bull whips, burnt electric guitars, used 1970’s tennis racquets, 45 rpm vinyl records and guitar plectrums, as well as drawings and paintings.