Questions for Listening Vol. IV
Collected as notes and documentation by a human recorder during the Listening Academy, September 2024, Berlin, and included as a contribution for the Anthology for Listening Vol. II.
Transcription:
What are we all carrying with us?
What are we bringing into the room?
How does it affect us/the room?
How may we welcome this influence?
To build friendship and family
To be together without a specific programme/outcome
To do listening – what does that mean?
To keep ‘love’ central
To keep the body central
What bodies? What is even a body?
What does it mean to be vulnerable?
How to understand listening as an action?
How to understand/act this as a listening action? (How can we not?)
What to do? What to do beyond the need for ‘doing’ and producing’?
What does it mean to document listening?
How is listening always already a practice of documenting and witnessing – embodied and beyond the traceable?
How to trace the ‘effects’ / the creation by listening?
What happens to listening when attempted to be documented?
Can only listeners document listening?
What kind of other ‘document’ does listening ask for?
What within listening refuses documentation, and instead asks for ‘being present’, for inventing other (soft) modes of sharing and witnessing(?); possibly able to resist our other (colonial) ‘hard’ and rigid archives?
To do poetic/artistic documentation
The body as a question to world
The body as a living archive
The body as poetic documentation of a complex
(In what ways) will the floors and walls of the space of the listening academy (always already) remember and be a ‘document’ of the activities taking place there?
To search for other modes of knowing
Listening as a different knowledge ‘producing/carrying/inviting’ practice
To cultivate practices for not-knowing, for not-yetness, for unknowable
What we don’t know that we don’t know – a possible category of knowledge that teaches us to listen?
Which strategic placed questions may undermine our knowledge?
To nurture embodied listening
To heal
To listen to/with/through/around the body
In what ways is embodied listening central to crafting a care for the ‘self’ – but also the ‘we’?
Listening as a contributing and supportive of communication
Listening as staying with/bridging disagreement
To be continual sensitive
‘Third listening’ as a speculative/conceptual framework for models and modes of intersubjectivity
How does listening nurture/create/cultivate ‘a we’ – is listening always already a mode of ‘we’?
Thirdness as a holding connecting to suffering/disagreement/conflict/non-knowledge
Thirdness as interdependence – may listening also be a form of interdependence; of a call for; an attunement of the always already existing interdependence?
How may listening enhance the sense of ‘we are in this together’?
Listening as an emergent strategy
To hold open the possibilities for community
Listening as a connective tissue
Listening as attuning to the ‘right relationship’ with the world
Listening as to bring attention to something – as something else than simply being attentive?
To think around receptivity as agency
In what ways does our attention affect/change what we are attentive to?
How is unlearning a mode of training listening?
What does it mean to train listening – who and what might be our teachers?
To think through difficult conversations
What are the conditions of listening – what are the challenges and possibilities?
What does it mean to listen critically and politically?
To listen poetically
To just listen
To stop listening
To be a grateful learner
When is listening unequally distributed?
How to engage listening in a time of genocide
The privilege that comes with gathering
The simple but fundamental and radical potential of ‘just’ being able to gather
Listening mobilized as a form of witnessing
To engage daily life as a form of listening
How to remember through listening?
To come with more questions than answers
To practice epistemic disobedience – listening as epistemic disobedience
Searching for other sensibilities
To unknow, disknow, not-know
Listening as surveillance
To welcome ‘being lost’
To cultivate more ‘in-betweenness’
To hold each other
In what ways does listening change the listener?
What listening species might we grow into?
What can an archive through listening and everyday life experience be like?
How to build a community through listening?
To be part of a poetic ecology
How to activate listening in relation to reproductive work – is this a site for learning to become a better listener?
The ‘carrier bag’ as a framework for listening
To listen to a heating city – to warm and exhausted bodies
To attempt playing a falling acorn as an instrument for the first time
To uncover chains of events of causality, simply by listening for them
Our bodies as an always already archival question to the world – how may we listen to other bodies as such questions?
To integrate playfulness as a way to counter extractivism in archival practices
To ‘make’ rather than collect or capture documentation
Language as an archive and carrier – a listening language as a listening archive
To center the sensing body
To think around and with community based work – who wants community-distanced work?
An invitation to stay sensitive to/with process
To make at the speed of trust
To work with uncertainty
To disrupt as liberation
Strength from/in being together – togetherness as methodology, as value, as the ‘work of art’
How do we wait?
How do we deal with impatience – foster patience? Who/what are our teachers?
How do we doubt – how do we doubt the institutionalized and tamed ways of doubting? How do we stay doubting?
How can we offer our waiting, our rest, dreaming and care for each other?
To trust the inherent/’natural’/ always already emergence – to lean in rather invent
To recognize all emergence, and not just human-centered emergence
To learn to be with emergence outside of our ability to recognize/know
We are always already emerging with and existing within complex we-ness
A battle of imagination
To imagine as a form of resisting/breaking free
The ability to imagine differently
To develop a new ethic of care
Hesitation as a practice for listening
To cultivate an ethic of hesitation – the one that hesitate the most, listen the most
To let ‘interconnectedness be’, to simply stay with it, linger with it, trust it
To breathe and to become
To listen with disruptions
Why is what is hard hard?
To be limited by what is listening?
To be limited by who is listening?
To be limited by what I have learned?
To be limited by how you learned?
To be limited by what we are doing while we are listening?
To lay down and listen
To imagine myself as a we
To decentralize as a fostering of interdependence
To perceive the presence of others
To surrender
To organize organically
To nurture ‘buffer zones’ such as sleep, dreaming, waiting
What do we feel called toward?
What do we surrender to?
To touch listening
To be a body of grief
‘… and I would listen again’
The connections being made is more powerful than the ‘dot holes’, the points of gravity and the
‘products showcased’
To be unable to scream
To belong, waiting to belong, to offer belonging
To be soft, to be powerful
To stay with uncontrollable sounds
The fear of using my voice
The power of speaking first
To turn the exceptional practices into daily practices
To not only tell the good heroic stories of the self
To long for connection in order to contribute
What does freedom create?
What is a space for holding?
Is your readiness questioned or always assumed?
What is my backpack?
To let go of fear through vulnerability
To be held as a way to hold others
To have inherent depth
Mourning as a space for liberation and refusal
Softness as a tissue or force
Listening with our feets
Who do we become when we trust?
How much do I add – should I add more or less?
To listen as a beehive
To move through/with stillness
To long for spontaneous collective silence
To reprogram what sounds means
How to reprogram our programs?
Who is allowed to make noise, when and in which spaces?
Which noise is by and for all?
How do we participate in noise as an activist movement?
Interdependencies with noise as a premise to have communication
A container for complex experiences and histories
Rather than exercise, we engage invitations and journeys
The value of revealing the hidden/unknown pain
To what extent do I feel safe?
The process of keep reattending embodied listening
All which can’t be sounded/aren’t sounding
The brutality of life as a description of our complex presences
How to find paths to validate unvoiced experiences?
That is it also fine to disappear – presence through absence
Listening as a form of thinking in action
To reflect, to doubt and to adapt
To decenter verbal communication as an emergent strategy for listening
To collect lots of smaller things
In what surprising/unknowable ways does listening lead to action?
In what non-normative way does listening lead?
Does listening lead(?), or do we follow by a trust in the leadingless?
Can I listen without responding?
What are the effects from listening within a constant surveillance system?
There are people who refuse to listen – how to engage with that?
What does it mean to be open for critique, when it is in service of a collective liberation?
What commitment does listening ask for?
To love unconditionally in a world of conditioned relationships
What is the duty of care – for the self, for the group, for outside the group?
What is the interdependence between listening and imagination?
How do we cultivate the ability to imagine differently?
To listen out of care
Imagination as never neutral – as always already the consequent of unique circumstances
That our bodies ability to imagine is only exhaustbale by death – and maybe not even then
To listen without knowing – to listening is to not know
To co-listening
To listen or not to listen
How to listen or not to other listeners?
To listen to emergent collective listening
To be relational listeners
When can we not listen?
What ‘trigger situations’ makes listening unwanted?
What is unwanted, or even harmful, listening?
Thank you for listening
To counter listen
That it is less regarding what we hear/sense, and more how we hear/sense it
To be guided by the wind
To listen without the need to understand
Is listening a form of de-understanding?
Listening over zoom: Are you there? Can you hear me? Can you please mute?
To allow other tongues to enter our language
All that which we don’t know that we don’t know, and that you keep whispering this to my tired ears under a bright cold winter sky
The unvoiced, silenced and inherent traumas of my grandfather
Questions as an emergent strategy
To trust being held as a we
In what ways does listening redefine what it means to ‘take action’?
To exercise politics of taking refusal into account
When is listening troubling?
What is the relationship between listening and futuring?
To trust, to lean in, to share noise
To be a noiser
To listen within an unwordly or untranslatable context
To have time and space for silence
Patience as an ingredient for listening
What does listening mean to the listener?
To act actively against extractive forms to listening
To listen to the Other, to otherness to the fearful stranger
To listen to a stranger without the need to understand
What kind of ‘being together’ is only possible when not understanding each other?
How can we learn to trust Otherness?
In what ways is trust a fundamental ingredient to life?
What does it mean to abuse trust?
How much misunderstanding can take place without a collapse of ‘sense’?
To speak ‘well’ as a overrated power
The medium is the message
If only I could this as fiction
Listening as reading the world as fiction
To let go of being precise as a strategy for fostering imagination
To be scared of being misunderstood
What is the relationship between risk taking and listening – what does one risk when listening(?); everything?
To accept that we can only misunderstand and not-know
To make untamed translations
The value of exercising and valuing but not celebrating precise language
How do we measure value?
The practice of giving birth to words asks for a listening midwife
To find and to keep refinding each other
To create is to evolve
To listen is to engage a multiverse
Listening as a countforce to limited imagination
What can our listening learn from practices grounded in fiction?
What does it mean to have a speculative listening practice grounded in a political contest?
In what ways is listening creating political contexts?
To listen with…
Listening operates simultaneously within different scales
What does it mean to allow for earworms to penetrate and transmit?
How does listening infect others?
In what ways does repetition create spaces of their own?
Can listening be repeated, or is listening always already different?
In what ways does listening evade spaces? How does spaces answer back?
As a human being, do we experience sound as space, or space as sound, or always already only soundspace?
To be a host, a carrier, that is open to be infected
To listen relentless
To transform past and future generation through the act of listening
To seek out unintentional spaces for listening
Imagination as risk
What are we willing to risk?
Do we know what we are willing to risk?
What is risking happening to us?
What does it mean that we are willing to listen without knowing the consequences of that listening or imagination?
The unfinished as an important ingredient
Do we share earworms?
To live through associative relations
To practice a loss of transmission
To shift attention to the critical connections
To open up
To forgive
To respond, to be responsible
To be carried and cared for
To carry and feel carried for, and to the carrier more
To attend, to speculate, to listen
To live among ghost sounds
To imagine ancestors and to listen to them
How to listen to/with clay?
What forms of listening does clay carry?
Listening as a practice for both macro and micro politics
How can we practice collective listening beyond language?
Listening to our traumas together to move beyond them.
How can we listen to silence?
How can we engage with our shared past?
Listening to our histories to discover a common language.
How can we use listening to explore, question, and connect with our listening bodies?
Further context:
This might be framed as detached and fragmentized notes without explanation, justification and further context made during the five days long manifestation of the Listening Academy, September 2024, Berlin. While an attempting ‘listening witness’ have started and organized this document, these notes are aiming at holding and being by many voices – all participants as well as comprehensive and not-knowable circumstances have shaped these notes; either by formulating the concepts in words, inspiring to them, or simply by supporting the space of the academy with their listening. Rather than an author creating these notes, it was done by listeners.
These notes are not able to exhaust the complexities of what was shared and discussed. So much went unnoted, and even innotable. It was all still co-shaping and co-holding. These notes here build on and carry with them much more than just was readable.
The notes ask to be listened to rather than to be ‘understood’. As a note, they can travel in many directions, be used for many projects, and be forgotten, embodied quietly, nurturing other dreams to grow. Please, for yourself, invite the notes to generate whatever they might generate for yourself – as they are shared without further context, they might just as well be approached poetically.
The listening academy was attended/shaped by Femke Dekker, Heidi Hart, Nicola Zolin, Marlijn Karsten, Camila Proto, hany tea, Ellen Waterman, Giulia Crisci, Anna Orlikowska, Heidi Holmström, Myriam van Imschoot, Ether o, Ira Ferris, Angus Tarnawsky, Arushi Vats, Arman Nouri, Yulia Carolin Kothe, Susanne Grau, Aine Nakamura, Marc Allen Herbst, Shareeka Helaluddin, Ginevra Naldini, Clare Cooper, Stijn Dickel, Morten Poulsen, Juana del Mar, Farah Kassem, Irini Kalogeropoulou, Sarina Scheidegger, Liva Hage, Lukas Lund, Jake Mehew, Henry Weekes, Uzma Falak, Giada Dalla Bonta, Golnoosh Heshmati.