Conversations for Listening

Introduction

Listening often takes place in good conversations. The kind of conversation, where the theme, expected outcome, intentions or whatever initiated the conversation in the first place is loosened up, and the conversation itself takes charge. You don’t direct it, it directs you. All partners listen in, and offer time and space, while also contributing with paths to follow, explore or escape from. 

 

This series of conversations were not originally planned as a series of conversations for listening. It is just involved in it. 

 

It is an ongoing project (hopefully for years, or lifetimes) based on different intentions and hopes for different outcomes.

Note on strategy

In some ways there is no strategy as the strategy. The questions are not planned, but are not planned deliberately. It is an open-ended conversation. Striving, perhaps, to be a philosophical or practicing one. We attempts to get lost, as the german philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein write: “a philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953, page 123). 

 

The conversation will be presented fragmentized, poetically, as an attempt to physically open up the conversations, to allow for imagination and a loss of orientation. The fragmentation does not necessarily reflect the most central arguments, descriptions, etc.

For, not on

Bureau for Listening, is for, not of.

So are these conversation for, not on – listening as a phenomena.

There is no authority. Just a search, and an attempt on create space, meetings and understandings for listening.

Conversation archive

Meeting and Listening – Randi Lindholm Hansen

Conversation I

We didn’t know that listening would be the subject of the conversation. That just happened. We just wanted a short conversation, but that seemed a mistake due to the feeling about listening as a practice that would grow over time. So we agreed to do a follow-up conversation. 

 

This conversation can be considered the beginning for the Bureau for Listening. A first meeting.

Attentionality with Closed Eyes – Tine Bernstorff Aagaard

Conversation II

Took place outside a sunny summer day in a public park June 2021, Copenhagen. The conversation was initiated in relation to the TRAVERS program.

For most of the conversation we sat in the grass with our eyes closed.