Photo: Enrique Arriaga. 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 and creaturely adventure.
The Listening Biennial brings together an international group of participating artists, musicians, and researchers, to pose 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, workshops and discursive events presented across a constellation of collaborating institutions, organizations, 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. Agenda delivers news from galleries, art spaces, and publications, while Criticism publishes reviews of exhibitions and books. Architecture announcements cover current architecture and design projects, symposia, exhibitions, and publications from all over the world. Film announcements are newsletters about screenings, film festivals, and exhibitions of moving image.
