The Listening Strike Manifesto

Oficina de Autonomia

 

Michele Schiocchet, Constance Pinheiro, Luigi Dangelo, João Paes, Helena Potela, Chiris Gomes, Rodrigo Janasievicz, Rodrigo Augusto Ribeiro, Aline Sugi, Amábilis de Jesus, Livia Zafanelli, Margit Leisner, Paula Lemos Guimarães, Elis Souza Rockenbach, Tuca Nissel, Gilson Camargo, Marcio Mattana, Sauane Buenos, Katia Horn, Octavio Camargo, Brandon LaBelle, Andressa Medeiros, Cleverson Oliveira, Isadora Foreck, Alaise Medeiros Cavaleiro, Kali Ossani

January 2017, Curitiba – Brazil

Announcement:

With the recent cancellation of the Oficina de Música de Curitiba by the Mayor’s office, after 34 years of active work, questions about culture and politics are brought forward, and how citizens may enact forms of resistance as well as autonomous projects. Through collective meeting and creative manifestations, we’re interested to counter the cancellation through a spirit of festivity and critical celebration. This will take the form of an alternative workshop, under the heading Oficina de Autonomia. The Oficina is posed as an open and free situation, without a strict center or form of authorship, and from which to demonstrate an autonomous sensibility in support of imagining beyond dominant social, civic structures. How might musical, sonic knowledges be directed to aid in political process and the dialogical labors desperately needed today? Are there new understandings of public culture as “social composition” to be crafted, following musical experiences and their potential configurations? If public culture is deeply shaped by free listening, education in music is equally an education in civility, and therefore the cancellation does little to overcome current social, political conflict. Oficina de Autonomia seeks to intervene through a collective study – a listening strike by which to demonstrate against the cancellation. 

 

Reflections: 

Oficina de Autonomia focused on questions of autonomous, self-organized culture and how sound and listening may support social solidarities. In particular, the Oficina set out to approach sound, and by extension music, as a knowledge and vocabulary for relating to and intervening in the social, political dynamics of the city (especially the emergence of a political culture aimed against the social programs of the labor party in Brazil). A series of concepts were developed and discussed, drawing upon music and sonic experience as guiding references. These included elaborating the auditory figures of echo, vibration, and rhythm, the tonalities of place, sonic commons, and the freedom of listening (“the listening strike”). From this terminology we were able to build up a common framework for exploring tactics by which to counter the exclusionary rhetoric of austerity and populism.

 

After extended discussions, sharing ideas and practices, as a group we decided on an approach for addressing the cancellation of the Oficina de Música. Our idea was to perform acts of collective listening aimed at particular sites in the city related to the cancellation, as well as sites connected to autonomous culture. These included: Palacio do Governo (Governor’s House), Prefeitura (Mayor’s office), Boca Maltida (public square), Capela Santa Maria (site of musical performance), and Atilio Borio, 603, a residential house where our meetings took place. At these sites, we gathered as a group and listened silently for fifteen minutes. 

 

The collective actions moved us to appreciating listening as the basis for social solidarities and nurturing the common good. Listening together as a group within particular sites engendered a type of attentional intensity, a non-verbal occupation that caused other people to pause and wonder – to listen to our listening. This accumulation of attention gave way to a subtle yet palpable alteration, where people slowed down, paused, came back to their bodies, came back to dwelling in the present, allowing for ways of noticing the environment and each other. What do we hear in this place, what do we not hear? In what way does listening affect what it listens to – is there a form of agency found in listening, one that enacts by acting otherwise? Holding the space by way of collective listening emerged as a counter-intuitive method of political demonstration which shifted the grammar of resistance from one of “militant opposition” to that of “radical receptivity,” from a collective voice to a collective ear, suggesting a more supple politics – for fostering spaces between people, giving room for acknowledging, witnessing, holding disagreement.

 

Listening together acted as an unexpected interruption onto the particular sites, one that performed to counter the cancellation of the Oficina de Música by mobilizing listening in support of cultural freedom. In this regard, the freedom of speech central to democratic society was complemented by an insistence on the freedom of listening – suggesting a type of “listening activism” onto places where a more nuanced dialogical work is urgently needed. A summer academy on music and related practices can be seen as an important contribution to fostering a robust civil society, for inherent to such learning is the enhancement of a listening culture. 

 

This is a listening strike. We invite you as a listener to join us in this strike. How might listening act as a form of strike? What can listening contribute to gestures of manifestation, refusal, exit? We propose a listening strike as an act that argues for listening to be more fully integrated into our social and political worlds.