Field Office for Listening / Metropolis

Bureau for Listening would like in collaboration with the Grass Field Institute for Contemporary Listening to present a Field Office for Listening.

The first version of this field office is attempted, searched for and tested/performed during a ‘landscape artist residency’ at Metropolis – Copenhagen International Theater.

It is important to point to the difference between a ‘field office’, a ‘landscape offie’ and a ‘nature office’. We are here proposing a ‘field office’ since both the landscape and nature is a challenge for the human being. The field is our creation, and therefor easier to install an office into. We do however dream of the office which the nature or landscape allows us to open. We dream of the permission and ability to enter a landscape as a bureau.

We would like to insist, that any attempt at a field office is also an exercise in failing. Going out in the field to conduct research is not enough. We must go out and get lost – forget about the gaze which our desire to research cast at the field, landscape and nature. The field office comes with a sudden narrative – one haunts and destroy our attempt of caring for and with the field. Ideally our work at the field office will lead to a burial ceremony for the office and the field. Hopefully by letting the office fail, the field fail, and our listening fail, something else can grow from where we before were occupiers.

Somewhere a little bit after the beginning the Field Office for Listening is just that; an office for listening in a field. In this case the anthropocene landscape field of Refshaleøen – a former industrial site in the harbor of Copenhagen. At the office we will attempt to let listening be present, investigate our practice for listening, letting new ways for listening be followed and cared for and perhaps enter news ways of being in landscape.

The office will be open 24 hours at the time and will remain open for longer if circumstances favors it.

If the office is unstaffed, feel free to take over.

Selected elements of possible produced content at the Field Office for Listening (why should anything by the initiative of the office ‘produce’?):

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Notes for Listening, Vol. VI. A report from the Field Office for Listening under the Grass Field Institute for Contemporary Listening.

Proposals for Listening by the Field Offie for Listening

A suicide note (for the landscape)

A booket containing textures and traces of 24 hours landscape listening

A circular walking path as a practice for listening

Breathing, Being, Listening and Falling – words for listening