LA23

The Listening Academy
Ballhaus Ost, Berlin
part of The Listening Biennial, July 2023

What is the relationship between listening, hearing and being heard?

Can a transect become a space of reciprocity?

Drawing from Matthew Gandy’s concept of the urban transect, could listening offer a way into the transect beyond practices of categorisation, othering, or colonial legacies toward land and people?

These are some of the questions I took into a week-long intensive at the Listening Academy. The Listening Academy, led by Brandon LaBelle and Lucia Farinati as part of The Listening Biennial, is ‘an artistic, research initiative focusing on listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. It acts as an umbrella bringing together practitioners, researchers, institutions and collectives engaged in listening as a method, a tool, a poetics. This includes the creation of an international Biennial exhibition, as well as organizing the Listening Academy in different cities.’

In Berlin, the academy was focused on creating new perspectives on relationality, practices of care and finding ways to attune to embodied experiences. From the perspective of nighttime attuning and relationality to more-than-human systems, this offered a space to think about my presence in a space in darkness and ways to attune to all that is beyond and connected to our body. Through exercises with choreographers, dancers, and researchers, I spent time thinking about how embodied listening could help consider the structures around which nature is framed, and what role our body plays in constructing that frame. It was also a space to reflect upon the listening practices and encounters in the past year, within an environment and exceptional group of practitioners focused upon embodied listening.  The academy provided a space to be vulnerable with each other, something that is not easy to create with strangers in a group setting. The practitioners leading exercises were adept at removing the rigidity of dialogue that come with first encounters, helping guide the group through the space and opening up for engaged conversation where each person had a voice. I am grateful and privileged to have been part of this year’s academy in Berlin and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a critical yet fertile space to ask important questions.

At the culmination of the end of the academy, I spent some nights moving around Berlin, putting these learnings into practice at different sites, which will be explored in a forthcoming post.

The Listening Biennial
Led by Brandon LaBelle and Lucia Farinati, with:
Thiago Granato
Nicole Michalla
Miriam Jakob and Lisa Densem