Bureau for Listening / The Listening Academy
Bureau for Listening was very fortunate to participate in the The Listening Academy #Berlin: listening and the body, July 2023, by The Listening Biennial.
At the academy we participated in extensive somatic, voice and breathing workshops, discussions and artistic presentations. We were able to share the work of Bureau for Listening and expand our network and community through the networking with the diverse group of theorists and practicers. We are thrilled to now be looking forward to new projects and collaborations.
We also managed to find time for five different conversations that explores central elements and practices presented and tested at the academy as part of the Conversations for Listening series.
Our participation was graciously financially supported by:
The Listening Academy, Berlin. Photo by Maria Helena Nerhus
Description of this edition of the academy by The Listening Biennial:
This edition of The Listening Academy focuses on questions and practices of embodiment, and in what ways listening opens paths toward somatic engagement and research. How does listening affect the body and ways of attuning to embodied experiences? Moreover, how do different bodies listen? In what sense might listening provide a generative approach to thinking and feeling the body, as well as conceptualizing new perspectives on relationality? If listening is fundamental to nurturing empathy and sympathetic knowing, as well as attending to past experience, how might this enhance deeper attention to bodily health and healing?
Following these first questions, the Academy aims at reflecting on listening as a bodily, sympathetic pathway and as the basis for movement strategies. This includes conceiving the body as a creative metabolism that is multiple and situated, and embedded within knowledge creation and relational know-how. Throughout the Academy, we’ll consider what becomes of situatedness by way of listening, and in what ways listening contributes to negotiating systems that demand bodies perform in particular ways. From empathic, sympathetic knowledge and the ethical movements and understandings listening affords, to the cultural and social logics that shape bodies and their positionality, the Academy will provide a time and space for nurturing critical-creative reflection and embodied experimentation.
Facilitated by researchers, artists and performers involved in sound studies, choreography, performative practices, voice and breath-work, we’ll think, speculate and share together, delving into concepts of listening and the body. We’ll also test ways of being in our bodies through exercises and experimentation involving breath and voice, dialogical encounter and shared attention, touch and tactility, to elaborate forms of sensing and working with bodily presence. Through such shared activity, we’ll search for ways to grow modes and forms of radical sympathy.