Notes for Listening from The Listening Academy

The Listening Academy

The following might be framed as detached and fragmentized notes without explanation, justification and further context made during the five days long manifestation of the Listening Academy, September 2024, Berlin. While an attempting ‘listening witness’ have started and organized this document, these notes are aiming at holding and being by many voices – all participants as well as comprehensive and not-knowable circumstances have shaped these notes; either by formulating the concepts in words, inspiring to them, or simply by supporting the space of the academy with their listening. Rather than an author creating these notes, it was done by listeners.

 

These notes are not able to exhaust the complexities of what was shared and discussed. So much went unnoted, and even innotable. It was all still co-shaping and co-holding. These notes here build on and carry with them much more than just was readable.

 

The notes ask to be listened to rather than to be ‘understood’. As a note, they can travel in many directions, be used for many projects, and be forgotten, embodied quietly, nurturing other dreams to grow. Please, for yourself, invite the notes to generate whatever they might generate for yourself – as they are shared without further context, they might just as well be approached poetically.

The listening academy was attended/shaped by Femke Dekker, Heidi Hart, Nicola Zolin, Marlijn Karsten, Camila Proto, hany tea, Ellen Waterman, Giulia Crisci, Anna Orlikowska, Heidi Holmström, Myriam van Imschoot, Ether o, Ira Ferris, Angus Tarnawsky, Arushi Vats, Arman Nouri, Yulia Carolin Kothe, Susanne Grau, Aine Nakamura, Marc Allen Herbst, Shareeka Helaluddin, Ginevra Naldini, Clare Cooper, Stijn Dickel, Morten Poulsen, Juana del Mar, Farah Kassem, Irini Kalogeropoulou, Sarina Scheidegger, Liva Hage, Lukas Lund, Jake Mehew, Henry Weekes, Uzma Falak, Giada Dalla Bonta, Golnoosh Heshmati.

What are we all carrying with us? 

What are we bringing into the room? 

How does it affect us/the room?

How may we welcome this influence? 

To build friendship and family 

To be together without a specific programme/outcome

To do listening – what does that mean? 

To keep ‘love’ central

To keep the body central

What bodies? What is even a body? 

What does it mean to be vulnerable? 

How to understand listening as an action? 

How to understand/act this as a listening action? (How can we not?) 

What to do? What to do beyond the need for ‘doing’ and producing’? 

What does it mean to document listening?  

How is listening always already a practice of documenting and witnessing – embodied and beyond the traceable? 

How to trace the ‘effects’ / the creation by listening?

What happens to listening when attempted to be documented? 

Can only listeners document listening? 

What kind of other ‘document’ does listening ask for? 

What within listening refuses documentation, and instead asks for ‘being present’, for inventing other (soft) modes of sharing and witnessing(?); possibly able to resist our other (colonial) ‘hard’ and rigid archives? 

To do poetic/artistic documentation

The body as a question to world 

The body as a living archive

The body as poetic documentation of a complex 

(In what ways) will the floors and walls of the space of the listening academy (always already) remember and be a ‘document’ of the activities taking place there?

To search for other modes of knowing

Listening as a different knowledge ‘producing/carrying/inviting’ practice

To cultivate practices for not-knowing, for not-yetness, for unknowable

What we don’t know that we don’t know – a possible category of knowledge that teaches us to listen? 

Which strategic placed questions may undermine our knowledge? 

To nurture embodied listening

To heal

To listen to/with/through/around the body

In what ways is embodied listening central to crafting a care for the ‘self’ – but also the ‘we’? 

Listening as a contributing and supportive of communication

Listening as staying with/bridging disagreement

To be continual sensitive

‘Third listening’ as a speculative/conceptual framework for models and modes of intersubjectivity 

How does listening nurture/create/cultivate ‘a we’ – is listening always already a mode of ‘we’? 

Thirdness as a holding connecting to suffering/disagreement/conflict/non-knowledge

Thirdness as interdependence – may listening also be a form of interdependence; of a call for; an attunement of the always already existing interdependence? 

How may listening enhance the sense of ‘we are in this together’? 

Listening as an emergent strategy

To hold open the possibilities for community

Listening as a connective tissue

Listening as attuning to the ‘right relationship’ with the world

Listening as to bring attention to something – as something else than simply being attentive?

To think around receptivity as agency

In what ways does our attention affect/change what we are attentive to? 

How is unlearning a mode of training listening? 

What does it mean to train listening – who and what might be our teachers? 

To think through difficult conversations

What are the conditions of listening – what are the challenges and possibilities? 

What does it mean to listen critically and politically? 

To listen poetically 

To just listen

To stop listening

To be a grateful learner

When is listening unequally distributed? 

How to engage listening in a time of genocide

The privilege that comes with gathering

The simple but fundamental and radical potential of ‘just’ being able to gather

Listening mobilized as a form of witnessing

To engage daily life as a form of listening

How to remember through listening? 

To come with more questions than answers

To practice epistemic disobedience – listening as epistemic disobedience

Searching for other sensibilities

To unknow, disknow, not-know

Listening as surveillance

To welcome ‘being lost’

To cultivate more ‘in-betweenness’

To hold each other

In what ways does listening change the listener? 

What listening species might we grow into? 

What can an archive through listening and everyday life experience be like? 

How to build a community through listening? 

To be part of a poetic ecology

How to activate listening in relation to reproductive work – is this a site for learning to become a better listener? 

The ‘carrier bag’ as a framework for listening

To listen to a heating city – to warm and exhausted bodies

To attempt playing a falling acorn as an instrument for the first time

To uncover chains of events of causality, simply by listening for them

Our bodies as an always already archival question to the world – how may we listen to other bodies as such questions? 

To integrate playfulness as a way to counter extractivism in archival practices

To ‘make’ rather than collect or capture documentation

Language as an archive and carrier – a listening language as a listening archive

To center the sensing body

To think around and with community based work – who wants community-distanced work? 

An invitation to stay sensitive to/with process

To make at the speed of trust

To work with uncertainty

To disrupt as liberation

Strength from/in being together – togetherness as methodology, as value, as the ‘work of art’

How do we wait? 

How do we deal with impatience – foster patience? Who/what are our teachers? 

How do we doubt – how do we doubt the institutionalized and tamed ways of doubting? How do we stay doubting? 

How can we offer our waiting, our rest, dreaming and care for each other?

To trust the inherent/’natural’/ always already emergence – to lean in rather invent

To recognize all emergence, and not just human-centered emergence

To learn to be with emergence outside of our ability to recognize/know 

We are always already emerging with and existing within complex we-ness

A battle of imagination

To imagine as a form of resisting/breaking free

The ability to imagine differently

To develop a new ethic of care

Hesitation as a practice for listening

To cultivate an ethic of hesitation – the one that hesitate the most, listen the most

To let ‘interconnectedness be’, to simply stay with it, linger with it, trust it

To breathe and to become

To listen with disruptions 

Why is what is hard hard? 

To be limited by what is listening?
To be limited by who is listening?
To be limited by what I have learned?
To be limited by how you learned?
To be limited by what we are doing while we are listening?

To lay down and listen 

To imagine myself as a we

To decentralize as a fostering of interdependence

To perceive the presence of others

To surrender

To organize organically

To nurture ‘buffer zones’ such as sleep, dreaming, waiting

What do we feel called toward?

What do we surrender to? 

To touch listening

To be a body of grief

‘… and I would listen again’

The connections being made is more powerful than the ‘dot holes’, the points of gravity and the ‘products showcased’

To be unable to scream

To belong, waiting to belong, to offer belonging

To be soft, to be powerful

To stay with uncontrollable sounds

The fear of using my voice

The power of speaking first

To turn the exceptional practices into daily practices

To not only tell the good heroic stories of the self 

To long for connection in order to contribute 

What does freedom create?

What is a space for holding? 

Is your readiness questioned or always assumed? 

What is my backpack? 

To let go of fear through vulnerability

To be held as a way to hold others

To have inherent depth

Mourning as a space for liberation and refusal

Softness as a tissue or force

Listening with our feets

Who do we become when we trust? 

How much do I add – should I add more or less? 

To listen as a beehive

To move through/with stillness

To long for spontaneous collective silence

To reprogram what sounds means

How to reprogram our programs? 

Who is allowed to make noise, when and in which spaces?

Which noise is by and for all? 

How do we participate in noise as an activist movement? 

Interdependencies with noise as a premise to have communication

A container for complex experiences and histories

Rather than exercise, we engage invitations and journeys

The value of revealing the hidden/unknown pain

To what extent do I feel safe?

The process of keep reattending embodied listening

All which can’t be sounded/aren’t sounding

The brutality of life as a description of our complex presences

How to find paths to validate unvoiced experiences? 

That is it also fine to disappear – presence through absence 

Listening as a form of thinking in action

To reflect, to doubt and to adapt

To decenter verbal communication as an emergent strategy for listening

To collect lots of smaller things

In what surprising/unknowable ways does listening lead to action? 

In what non-normative way does listening lead? 

Does listening lead(?), or do we follow by a trust in the leadingless? 

Can I listen without responding? 

What are the effects from listening within a constant surveillance system? 

There are people who refuse to listen – how to engage with that? 

What does it mean to be open for critique, when it is in service of a collective liberation? 

What commitment does listening ask for? 

To love unconditionally in a world of conditioned relationships

What is the duty of care – for the self, for the group, for outside the group?

What is the interdependence between listening and imagination? 

How do we cultivate the ability to imagine differently? 

To listen out of care

Imagination as never neutral – as always already the consequent of unique circumstances

That our bodies ability to imagine is only exhaustbale by death – and maybe not even then

To listen without knowing – to listening is to not know

To co-listening 

To listen or not to listen

How to listen or not to other listeners?

To listen to emergent collective listening

To be relational listeners

When can we not listen? 

What ‘trigger situations’ makes listening unwanted? 

What is unwanted, or even harmful, listening? 

Thank you for listening

To counter listen

That it is less regarding what we hear/sense, and more how we hear/sense it

To be guided by the wind

To listen without the need to understand

Is listening a form of de-understanding? 

Listening over zoom: Are you there? Can you hear me? Can you please mute?

To allow other tongues to enter our language

All that which we don’t know that we don’t know, and that you keep whispering this to my tired ears under a bright cold winter sky

The unvoiced, silenced and inherent traumas of my grandfather

Questions as an emergent strategy

To trust being held as a we

In what ways does listening redefine what it means to ‘take action’?

To exercise politics of taking refusal into account

When is listening troubling? 

What is the relationship between listening and futuring? 

To trust, to lean in, to share noise

To be a noiser

To listen within an unwordly or untranslatable context

To have time and space for silence

Patience as an ingredient for listening

What does listening mean to the listener? 

To act actively against extractive forms to listening

To listen to the Other, to otherness to the fearful stranger

To listen to a stranger without the need to understand

What kind of ‘being together’ is only possible when not understanding each other?

How can we learn to trust Otherness? 

In what ways is trust a fundamental ingredient to life? 

What does it mean to abuse trust? 

How much misunderstanding can take place without a collapse of ‘sense’? 

To speak ‘well’ as a overrated power

The medium is the message 

If only I could this as fiction

Listening as reading the world as fiction

To let go of being precise as a strategy for fostering imagination 

To be scared of being misunderstood

What is the relationship between risk taking and listening – what does one risk when listening(?); everything? 

To accept that we can only misunderstand and not-know

To make untamed translations

The value of exercising and valuing but not celebrating precise language

How do we measure value? 

The practice of giving birth to words asks for a listening midwife

To find and to keep refinding each other

To create is to evolve 

To listen is to engage a multiverse 

Listening as a countforce to limited imagination

What can our listening learn from practices grounded in fiction? 

What does it mean to have a speculative listening practice grounded in a political contest? 

In what ways is listening creating political contexts? 

To listen with…

Listening operates simultaneously within different scales

What does it mean to allow for earworms to penetrate and transmit? 

How does listening infect others? 

In what ways does repetition create spaces of their own?

Can listening be repeated, or is listening always already different? 

In what ways does listening evade spaces? How does spaces answer back? 

As a human being, do we experience sound as space, or space as sound, or always already only soundspace? 

To be a host, a carrier, that is open to be infected

To listen relentless 

To transform past and future generation through the act of listening 

To seek out unintentional spaces for listening

Imagination as risk 

What are we willing to risk?

Do we know what we are willing to risk? 

What is risking happening to us? 

What does it mean that we are willing to listen without knowing the consequences of that listening or imagination? 

The unfinished as an important ingredient

Do we share earworms?

To live through associative relations

To practice a loss of transmission

To shift attention to the critical connections

To open up 

To forgive

To respond, to be responsible 

To be carried and cared for

To carry and feel carried for, and to the carrier more

To attend, to speculate, to listen

To live among ghost sounds

To imagine ancestors and to listen to them

How to listen to/with clay?

What forms of listening does clay carry? 

Listening as a practice for both macro and micro politics

How can we practice collective listening beyond language?

Listening to our traumas together to move beyond them.

How can we listen to silence?

How can we engage with our shared past?

Listening to our histories to discover a common language.

How can we use listening to explore, question, and connect with our listening bodies?