The Listening Biennial - second edition
The Listening Biennial is taking place from July 6 - August 8, 2023, including exhibitions, performance events, workshops and seminars across a constellation of participating venues and institutions. As part of the Communities in Movement research project, the Biennial continues to develop as a framework for investigating listening and its impact on embodied, social and poetic worlding. For the second edition, this is given particular focus on questions of attentional ecologies: In contrast to forms of cognitive capitalism, Yves Citton argues for attentional ecologies that can support and enhance sensate sovereignty across society. While cognitive capitalism instrumentalizes and individualizes attention, attentional ecologies nurture critical and creative capacities and related interdependent bonds. Ecologies of attention are fundamental to acknowledging and supporting mutuality and reciprocity; they do much to keep open what counts within the arenas of the sensible, reminding how “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (S. Weil). The second edition of The Listening Biennial is envisaged as an ecology of attention, one shaped by a critical concern for challenging existing constructs of exclusion and extraction, and that invites a shift from paying to giving attention. Such giving is emphasized as profoundly dynamic, that moves across a range of sites and scenes, and whose movements incite and seed forms of recognition and cooperation, collective joy and contestation. This includes what we may term poetic sensing, where methods of engagement are enhanced by the power of the imagination. Following such perspectives, The Listening Biennial opens onto questions of sensate sovereignty and attentional ecologies, as well as imaginary power and the acts of storying that follow, and how these contribute to communal flourishing.
For more information, and to follow the program of events, please visit the Biennial website: https://listeningbiennial.net/biennial-editions/second-edition