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. And yet listening is greatly undervalued and neglected across society.

THE LISTENING BIENNIAL draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. From radical empathy to weak ontology, poetic refusal to diasporic resistance, eavesdropping to intimate envelopment, listening wields a creative and critical force that may contribute to maintaining the diversity of our social adventure.

THE LISTENING BIENNIAL brings together an international group of participating artists, musicians, and researchers, as well as institutions and collectives across the globe, to foster questions and experiences of listening. The Listening Biennial is conceived as a global project and aims at a curatorial construct of shared resonances and polyvocal manifestations. This includes the exhibition of audio works, experimental performances, and discursive events presented across a constellation of collaborating institutions and venues, where listening and locality are accentuated, and cultural specificities contribute to a greater ecology of attention. From critical storytelling, experimental noise, and musical rapture to acoustic care, interspecies contact, and environments of sounded matter, the Biennial aims at fostering a listening world.

THE LISTENING BIENNIAL
July 15 – August 1, 2021

FOUNDING INITIATOR
Brandon LaBelle

CURATORS
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Brandon LaBelle
Israel Martínez?
Yang Yeung?

COLLABORATIVE PARTNERS
Rayya Badran
Florencia Curci
Hardi Kurda
Gentian Meikleham
Alexandre St-Onge
Lucia Udvardyova
James Webb?

–> https://listeningbiennial.net/