Curated by Brandon LaBelle
in dialogue with Christine Eyene and Hypatia Vourloumis

In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, Silvia Federici affirms that today’s capitalistic system imposes the need to listen to our body in order to reestablish its power: “Our bodies have reasons that we must understand, rediscover, reinvent. Our health and healing require to listen to our body language just like our planet’s health depends on our ability to listen and understand the rhythm of nature.” According to Federici’s invitation, how can we actually understand what listening to the body means? In which sense can the body be listened to? How does listening engage questions of positionality? in which ways does the body accommodate or resist?

The seminar investigates the social and political dimensions of the act of listening, focusing on affective and epistemological potentials. From listening-to to listening-with, from in-depth-listening to antagonistic listening; the act of listening further prompts consideration of the acoustic arrangements and economies that have impact on emancipatory and creative practices. Listening reveals the ways in which our body does not simply belong to us only but is rather connected through social, family and institutional bonds. The seminar sets out to map such entanglements along with diverse individual acoustic landscapes.

The seminar invites to reflect on collaborative sound and listening and how they operate within the practices. This includes aspects of musicality and (social) composition, radio practices and sound archiving, voice and embodiment.Bio

Brandon LaBelle

is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. He develops and presents artistic projects within a range of international contexts, often working collaboratively and in public. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making. He is the author of The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2019; 2010), and Background Noise (2015; 2006). He is editor of Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, and Professor at the Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen. https://www.brandonlabelle.net/

Christine Eyene

is an art historian, critic and curator and research fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) where she collaborates to Making Histories Visible, an interdisciplinary visual arts research project documenting, supporting, and sharing the histories of creative practices from the diversity in Britain and globally through collaborations with artists, art professionals, independent organisations and major public institutions. Her areas of research and curatorial practice encompass contemporary African and Diaspora arts, feminism, photography, and non- object-based art practices notably sound art. Her other interests include: socially- engaged initiatives, urban culture, music, design, and new media.

As an art writer, her latest publication is entitled Sounds Like Her: Gender, Sound Art & Sonic Cultures (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2019). She also contributed to Feminist Art, Activisms, and Artivisms (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020). Her articles and essays have been published in printed and online art magazines, journals, exhibition catalogues and art books. Since 2017, Eyene has been artistic director of the Biennale Internationale de Casablanca. Eyene is member of the acquisition committee of FRAC – Fonds régional d’art contemporain de la Réunion, with an interest in arts from the Indian Ocean. She is also a member of the scientific committee of Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. http://eyonart.blogspot.co.uk

Hypatia Vourloumis

is a performance theorist working across Indonesian and modern Greek cultural production which she investigates with an anticolonial, feminist, critical race and queer approach. Her interests range from philosophies of the language of music, poetics to sound studies.
After receiving her Ph.D in performance studies at NYU, she was postdoctoral research fellow at the Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Centre at Freie University and the ResearchCentre for the Humanities in Αthens. She is co-editor of Performance Research journal On Institutions and has published in journals, art catalogues and edited volumes including “Women & Performance”, “Ephemera”, and “Theatre Journal”. She is co-author with Sandra Ruiz of a book on the aesthetics of resonance (Minor Compositions) and is currently completing a monograph on postcolonial Indonesian paralanguage. She teaches theory at the Dutch Art Institute.