In what ways can listening be mobilized as a form of critical intervention, one that can impact onto scenes of personal and political struggle? How is listening utilized or figured within experiences of trauma, supporting acts of domination as well as healing and recuperation? What forms of knowledge emerge from sonic practices and projects, where listening is taken on as an experimental, relational position? And are there new opportunities for supporting listening as what can aid in reworking current attention economies? Following these lines of questioning, The Listening Academy aims at fostering transdisciplinary discussions on the topic of listening which can contribute to understandings and acts of recognition and repair. This includes nurturing new imaginaries and knowledges around what it means to hear and be heard, to voice and respond, within today’s planetary environment. 

This edition of the Academy brings together an international group of scholars, researchers and practitioners whose creative and critical expertise are supportive for diversifying what an art or science of listening may be. Through individual presentations, discussions and performative works, we’ll engage listening as the basis for storying other narratives and how it may enable thinking alongside and with the complexities of global experience. 

Program: 

Monday, October 17: Opening reception, 18:30
The unfinished institution, Damsgårdsveien 229, 5160 Laksevåg 
Introductory welcome, Brandon LaBelle
Performance: James Webb, A series of personal questions addressed to the North Sea (2022)

Tuesday, October 18, 10:00 - 16:00: 
The unfinished institution, Damsgårdsveien 229, 5160 Laksevåg 
Luísa Santos, imag(in)ing narratives via care and listening
Nathalie Aghoro, Listening, Sonic Practice, and the Contemporary American Stage
Merete Røstad, Embodied Sound Archive
Miguel Buenrostro, Cosmoaudiciones
Nanna Hauge Kristensen, Loss and Rain. Listening as an act of intimacy.
Sara Mikolai, On listening as a decolonial strategy in dance aesthetics

Evening concert, 19:30: 
Grieg Academy, Studio A, Lars Hilles gate 3, 5015 Bergen 
Andrea Szigetvári in conversation with Dániel Péter Biró
Andrea Szigetvári, BeefKohlrabi Cantata / Marhakaralábé Kantáta (2017) 
Performed by Zsuzsa Zseni, Mezzo-Soprano and Andrea Szigetvári, electronics 

Wednesday, October 19, 10:00 - 16:00: 
The unfinished institution, Damsgårdsveien 229, 5160 Laksevåg 
Leah Bassel, Listening for Migrant Justice: The London Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal “The Hostile Environment on Trial” 
Mhamad Safa, Collateral Listening: Aural Shocks Beyond Quantification 
Wanda Canton, Radical Listening as Abolitionist Practice
Margarida Mendes, Somatic listening and the expansion of the sonic imagination
Rebecca Collins, On Scientific Misuse, or What’s the Use of a Sonic Detective in an International Interdisciplinary Scientific Experiment?

Evening talk & performance: The Pirate Academy, 19:00
The Art Academy, Knut Knaus, Møllendalsveien 61, 5009 Bergen 

Brandon LaBelle, Poetics of listening
Performance, Sara Mikolai, listening – sound narratives of a dance