Projects / Social Acoustics
Through the framework of social acoustics, questions and practices of listening are put forward as central to understandings of community. While emphasis is often placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of free speech, particularly as expressions of agency, listening is key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, as well as social transformation. To listen is to extend the boundaries of the familiar, the recognized and the known. In addition, listening affords more egalitarian, decolonized, and ecologically-attuned relations, staggering exclusionary systems and human exceptionalism by way of planetary orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self / other. Listening is posed as a social power, one that may open and hold, support and attend, and which affords escape and deep friendship.
Social acoustics is explored through a range of discursive, material and curatorial activities, and aims at positing an "acoustic model" that can impact onto approaches to community building.
Partners to the project: Brandon LaBelle, Doa Aly, Ricarda Denzer, Errant Sound, Berlin , Zorka Wollny, Achim Lengerer, Julia Tieke, The Listening Biennial