A Good Listener Knows That Knowledge is Everywhere, And. –– A Spiral Lecture in the Context of Applied Ecologies

Applied Ecological Listening #1

Part of a workshop and lecture series in three iterations with Daniela Medina Poch, Yuri Tuma, and Tim Rudbøg respectively, facilitated by Bureau for Listening.

Details

Time: 3 Sept. 2025, 15:30-17:30

OBS: Please arrive in good time, as it takes up to 15 minutes to walk from the metro to the site inside Amager Fælled. 

Place: Amager Fælled, meeting point along one of the main paths close to the little northern lake, please meet at the coordinates: (55.6584120, 12.5807368), at Island Brygge metro st. will be someone with a flag saying: LISTEN, who can provide guidance.

To bring: A bottle of water, and clothing according to the weather as we will be outside. 

Contact number: 0045 40212007 / bureauforlistening@gmail.com

Organizer: Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE) and Bureau for Listening. The event is part of the The Listening Biennial programme in Copenhagen running through September and October.

 

Sign up through the event at CApE.

How does a spiral work?

A spiral is a circular form that evokes movement.
Movement is usually conceived linearly, but there is also movement in undulations.
Something interesting about a spiral is that there are adjacent relations, but also transversal and diagonal ones. The inner undulation meets the outer one; in this way, the spiral is, somehow, a transtemporal device.
There are generally two ways to navigate a spiral: from its core to its outer layers, or from the outer layers toward its core – but perhaps there are many more.
You will listen to an expanded range of references, you might feel lost. Bear with uncertainty.
Throughout this spiral, we will navigate different dimensions of listening: moving from the atmospheric, the speculative, and the bodily, to counter-extractivist and counter-surveillance kinds of listening, and into the relational, reciprocal, and generative.

In the end, a call to the feast –– a shared harvest, and a tribute to the wind, the ultimate listener.

By Daniela Medina Poch and the winds of Amager Fælled.

Applied Ecological Listening is a three-part series of outdoor workshops and lectures that invites artists, researchers, and members of the public to explore listening as an embodied and situated ecological practice. Hosted at Amager Fælled—a now protected natural area shaped by a layered history of military use, landfilling, and ongoing care and struggle—the programme unfolds within a landscape that embodies the call to explore listening in search of a reorientation toward ecological transformation, resistance, and resilience.

The programme asks: how might we listen differently in a time of climate crisis and ecological transformation? What kind of applied ecological listening does our time require? How can we cultivate a mode of attention attuned not only to what is voiced and sounding, but also to what is silenced, omitted, or unheard? Applied Ecological Listening is an invitation to shift the dominant logics of perception—away from extractive seeing, knowing, and naming—toward a practice of being-with, sensing-with, and listening-with the entangled worlds we inhabit.

Through a series of field-based and experimental lectures, workshops, and collective reflections, the series approaches listening not only as a sensory mode, but as a critical method for attuning to the complex entanglements of ecological life—practicing listening as a way of noticing relations across species, histories, and material traces; of sensing what is present, what is not known, and what is yet to be heard.

Over the course of the series, Bureau for Listening will facilitate the gathering and production of various outputs and forms of documentation, in collaboration with the invited ‘speakers’ and participants—for example, an Applied Ecological Listening Manifesto, listening prompts, and poetic fragments—which will be published at the end of the series.

Daniela Medina Poch (b. Bogotá) is an artist, author and _____. Working from an counter-extractivist perspective, her practice explores unofficial histories, non-hegemonic forms of knowledge, and systems of reciprocity to reimagine kinship, governance, and interspecies alliances. She has cultivated long-term collaborations with riverine, oceanic, and estuarine waters, wild plants, and polluted soils across diverse ecosystems in Abya Yala and Europe, harvesting hybrid communication protocols.  Medina Poch works site-specifically and relationally, engaging with expanded listening practices, installations, performance and experimental lectures. Her interests lie in processes that emerge from—and ultimately exceed—artistic approaches.

Medina Poch currently works for the Live Programme Team at Gropius Bau in Berlin. A Goldrausch fellow (2023) and nominee for the Rainer Wild Prize (2025), she has presented her work at institutions and events including MUDAM, Luxembourg (2025), The I Listening Biennial, Berlin (2021), the XXII Cerveira Biennial, Portugal (2022) TBA21 Academy, Ocean Space Online (2022) and documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022). Her work is part of the permanent collections of MAMBO, Bogotá and the digital collection of the Museum of Historical Memory of Bogotá. Daniela Medina Poch is founder of the climate justice platform Embodied Climate Agency.

The Listening Biennial is an international artistic and research initiative that highlights listening as a relational capacity—a philosophical, political, creative, and research-driven practice .

The Biennial operates as a decentralized global platform, commissioning audio works, performances, and discursive programs across cities. Embracing radical empathy, ecological attunement, sonic storytelling, and interspecies dialogues, it asks: how can listening dismantle exclusion, human exceptionalism, and entrenched power structures?

Since its launch in 2021, The Listening Biennial has grown through local “manifestations” with partner venues and institutions. It also runs the Listening Academy, a series of workshops and seminars on listening as creative practice, in cities like Berlin, Delhi, Hong Kong, and Skopje.

Under a network of artists, curators, scholars, and collectives, the Biennial fosters an ecology of attention, encouraging participatory, attuned, and diverse listening cultures worldwide.

—

As an afterthought, Daniela offer us this drawing and sentence:

 

‘the possibility to look at the ground horizontally, from below and up, from the perspective of an insect, even with my human eyes’

Thinkers as listeners and generosity in exchange, beyond cognitive extractivism

An after-aftermath of A Good Listener Knows that Knowledge is Everywhere, And.

By Daniela Medina Poch

Ideas blossom in the air as a spore, a common spore. Attentive people can listen. They love arriving at ping pong games, kitchen conversations, panel discussions, when expected and when unexpected. Also fermented as aftermath thoughts, missing the time specificity in which they would have been on point.

These floating ideas arrive to minds and transform through living spirits, burning hearts, and thinking feet; they receive specific qualities, nuances, tones, textures, frictions too – that is the work of listeners, to model and shape them with their very own textures – and many assume custody of the idea for a while with devotion and sincerity, while it inhabits them. Yet, ideas take on another kind of life and endurance beyond their listeners – most often it is the ideas that lives on, and the listener might be forgotten. At the end, it is the idea – the spore – that is generative and what can possibly sprout future gardens. Listeners may remain, though, with a burning heart and inspired feet, just as it happens after a fruitful exchange – and possibly open to mother another idea – generative in another way.

To exchange ideas, to let them circulate – whether through the council of winds, by publishing them, by shouting them, by whispering them, by articulating them in long essays, text messages – is both a pleasure and a duty, for it is essential in the processing, understanding, complexifying and expanding of realities and the transformation of things. For things are not fixed; they are always becoming; and ideas are the invisible building blocks of what eventually becomes infrastructure. Neither cognitive extractivism nor surveillance apparatuses can take away this from us. To lose that would be the victory of scarcity. Some won’t understand that wealth is generosity and exchange itself.

Documentation

We will update this site after the event with different forms of ‘documentation’ and extended material gathered and produced in relation to the spiral lecture.

There will be digestion and fermentation; both known and tangible traces, as well as the unknown-yet existing traces, the many traces we will not be able to trace…

Eco Thoughts Podcast featuring the spiral lecture: A Good Listener Knows that Knowledge is Everywhere, And.

 

Index Cards on A Good Listener Knows That Knowledge is Everywhere, And.

The Spiral Lecture Script: a mix of pauses, among a walk, lecture, and a feast.

Landing and arriving:

The Spiral Lecture:

The feast:

Reflections and impressions: