Publications / The Listening Biennial Reader
Within today’s intensely polarized environment, in which political and social debate often tend toward conflict or impasse, might listening enact an intervention? While focus is often placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of free speech, listening is radically key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, and 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 empathetic, attentional, and more-than-human orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self and other. Listening is a power, it may open and hold, it may support and attend, and it may afford escape and deep friendship.
The Listening Biennial / Reader draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. This includes contributions by the curators, a number of participating artists, and facilitators of the related Listening Academy. Through essays, reflections, and speculative research, listening is considered a creative and critical force that may contribute to maintaining the diversity of our social and creaturely adventure.
