Bureau for Listening as Performance

This text/theme is an ongoing exploration and will be subject to updates/additions as the thinking and performance continues.

Bureau for Listening as Performance

We would like to propose that to listen is to act; or to be in action. When not isolated, this action is also a performance. To listen is to perform. In a world saturated with speech, noise, and distraction, the Bureau for Listening presents itself as a radical intervention and orientation—an organization that is equally a performance, a methodology, a framework, and an artwork. And other. And more. To be part of this Bureau is to enter a liminal space where listening becomes both the medium and the message, the aesthetic and the ethics, the structure and the speculation. The bureau is an action. A way of being. A performance.

 

The Bureau does not merely advocate for listening; it stages listening. It crafts environments, rituals, and protocols that transform listening into an intentional, embodied act. It is not about standing apart but about becoming porous, about feeling the world’s murmurs settle into the skin, about attuning oneself to the nearly imperceptible rhythms of spaces and bodies. The acts of moving, pausing, waiting; of not-knowing, of not-acting—these, too, are modes of listening, and in their unfolding, the Bureau performs an unspoken score of receptivity. The experience is one of disorientation and recalibration, of shifting the weight of presence from assertion to attention. Listening is never neutral; it is always a negotiation, a quiet engagement with the edges of knowledge, an act of testing where one stands in relation to another.

 

The Bureau exists as a position for one to occupy, to embody, to engage and discover—a place, structure, format, mode, that facilitates an ongoing process rather than a fixed endpoint. It is a structure that makes space for the multiplicity of listening performances, for the listener as performer, for the observer drawn into the contours of sound, and for the environment itself as an ever-changing stage. The performativity of listening affects not only the listener but also those who witness it, those who are listened to. To listen is to create a moment of suspension, a relationship, where perception is altered, where the known is unsettled and the unknown given space and time to resonate. Spaces shift under the influence and affection of listening; what was static becomes fluid, what was overlooked gains weight, what was assumed becomes questioned. Listening is generative—it is an act without clear beginning or ending, a movement through which worlds emerge and dissolve.

 

We are born into this world as listeners, as listening performers. To be listening is simultaneously our first orientation of the world and our first performance with it. Before we speak, we listen; before we comprehend, we sense. Curious and dependent we listen in all directions. Every act of listening carries within it a form of roleplaying, a constant testing of thresholds, of the boundaries between sound and silence, self and other. When listening we may roleplay as something or someone else; we may stretch our being. When listening we rest possible roles and relationships. The Bureau for Listening is not a fixed entity but a field of attunement, an invitation to occupy the position of the listener with intent and care. The Bureau for Listening plays with different roles. In doing so, it facilitates spaces that exist in-between—the pause before response, the residue of sound that lingers, the unarticulated but deeply felt. These are spaces where listening is not merely a function but a shared practice, an architecture of intersubjective resonance. It’s in these gaps, these not-yet static roles that the bureau operates and listening is manifested.

 

To perform listening is also to navigate its political implications. In a world where certain voices dominate while others are suppressed, the act of listening is inherently entangled with power. The Bureau for Listening seeks to disrupt the hierarchies of speech and attention, carving out spaces where listening asserts itself as a counter-practice, as a form of resistance. But does this performative approach risk codifying listening into an institution? Does it impose its own frameworks onto an organic and deeply personal practice? Or does it, in its very structure, resist such rigidities by remaining an evolving, speculative, and participatory experiment? What does the performativity of a bureau offer, and what does it take away?

 

The Bureau exists as a gentle architecture of attention—shifting, unfixed, quietly unfolding in the intervals between words. It is at once a real and unreal entity, a bureaucratic structure and an artistic gesture, a listening body and a body that is listened to. It does not dictate listening but enacts and experiments with its possibilities. It is an offering, a poetic and political act, an opening in the fabric of daily life where the unspoken and the unsounded find space to emerge. It dissolves the border between performer and participant, between self and environment, between the heard and the unheard. In doing so, the Bureau invites a new mode of being—one in which we do not merely inhabit the world, but listen it into presence.

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This text came into being through a series of ongoing conversions and wonders regarding the performativity of the bureau within the bureau, and in particular sparked by a conversation with researcher and radio producer Ilaria Gadenz.

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Performance Instructions for Bureau for Listening Staff:

These instructions are meant as invitations—subtle disruptions, quiet interventions, gestures of attunement.

The Displaced Ear
Enter a public space and listen as if you do not belong to it. Stand in doorways, on thresholds, at the edge of movement. Absorb the space as if it is speaking directly to you. Shift your position as sound shifts. Move as an extension of what is heard.

 

The Collective Pause
Find others. Inhabit a space together without speaking, only listening. Let the act of group listening become visible. What does the city do when it is being listened to? Who notices? How does space rearrange itself when it is held in deep attention?

 

The Resonance Exchange
When listening to a sound, respond not with speech but with another sound—tap, hum, echo, breathe. Allow your listening to become an offering. Let the environment answer back. Let sound move between bodies, between walls, between the seen and unseen.

 

The Tuning of the Street
Walk with intent, as if sound is leading you somewhere. Follow a frequency, a murmur, a repeated pattern. If others join, move together as if composing an unseen score. What happens when the street is approached as a shifting composition, as a field of attunement?

 

The Archive of the Unheard
Find a sound that is disappearing. A voice seldom acknowledged, a mechanical murmur fading from use, a space once filled with resonance. Carry it forward—describe it, imitate it, record it, or simply remember. Let listening become an act of preservation, a refusal of erasure.