To Listen Otherwise: Notes on The Listening Biennial and Third Listening

Contextual Note

 

This text has been written in relation to The Listening Biennial exhibition at Simian and comments on the framework of Third Listening as developed by Brandon LaBelle. Rather than offering a curatorial statement or fixed interpretation, a narrative to read and listen along, the text responds to the themes and questions emerging within LaBelle’s thinking, while allowing space for further wonderings, doubts, and resonances that surfaced in discussions with artists, listeners, and participants. Like the exhibition itself, the text remains intentionally open and provisional — an invitation to enter listening as an unfinished practice, unfolding between selves, spaces, and worlds.

 

This text is subject to changes – or simply, the addition of other notes as the program unfolds.

To Listen Otherwise: Notes on The Listening Biennial and Third Listening

Where are we when we listen? Not quite here, not entirely elsewhere. Listening pulls us out of ourselves and folds us into something larger, something unsettled. It unsettles identity, loosens edges, and leaves us porous to the unfamiliar. Perhaps this is where The Listening Biennial begins, or rather continues — not in explanation, of a fixed identity or path, but in the invitation to lose our bearings, to enter a space of reorientation and wondering.

 

Brandon LaBelle writes, “To listen is to leave something of myself behind.” This leaving is not abandonment but transformation. Listening shifts us from the solitary into the relational, where the lines of individuality shimmer and blur. In the framework of Third Listening, we are asked not to master sound but to inhabit it, to let it rearrange us. Listening-with, rather than listening-to. This distinction matters profoundly. It opens a space where we are not distant receivers of information but participants in an unfolding encounter, co-creating its meaning, even as it slips away.

 

The Biennial gathers these possibilities without closing them. It invites us into a terrain where listening becomes a practice of interdependency, where sound operates less as signal and more as threshold. It is an unsettled place. To listen here is to stumble, to hesitate and linger, to begin again — not as an expert but as a novice, perpetually arriving at the act for the first time. Listening refuses certainty; it keeps us close to the trembling edges of experience.

 

But listening is never neutral. It carries histories, silences, violences. Whose voices are amplified? Whose are erased? What remains inaudible, even within our most careful attentions? LaBelle, drawing on María del Rosario Acosta López, gestures toward a “radical form of listening” — one that does not simply receive but invents grammars, making audible what dominant structures have rendered unspeakable. Such listening asks us to confront dispossession, displacement, and the long shadows of systemic harm. Yet it also asks for humility: the recognition that not everything seeks to be heard, that some silences carry dignity, that refusal, too, can be a form of presence.

 

This unsettles the comforting image of the “good listener.” J. Logan Smilges reminds us that listening, as an ethical ideal, risks becoming a demand — to perform attentiveness, to get it “right.” But what if listening is allowed to falter? What if we give ourselves permission to forget, to mishear, to drift away? What if listening is not a duty but an improvisation — one that admits distraction, unevenness, opacity? Perhaps The Listening Biennial offers such a space: where listening opens into refusal, where failure, too, has value. Where mastery and making accessible is circumvented. We may fundamentally ask: what can only be found, listened-with, become, while leaning into not-knowing?

 

And yet, when including an abstraction such as not-knowing, we still cannot speak of listening without the body. As Susan Raffo writes, learning to listen is also learning to become the anatomy we inhabit, to sense life’s subtle signatures within muscles, tissues, breath. Listening is not contained by the ear; it travels through skin, bone, gut. The body remembers, carries, trembles. It holds intergenerational inheritances — wounds and loves alike. When we listen here, we do not listen alone; we listen with all the histories folded, pressed as well as caressed, into us, and all the worlds touching us. The Biennial, and the spaces we may attempt to find, create, and inhabit, thus becomes less a collection of works and already known codes of conduct, but rather a resonant field, where bodies and environments compose each other, hold and enable each other, where sound leaks into gesture, where listening becomes inseparable from our sensing bodies.

 

This porousness extends beyond the human. Third Listening leans toward what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “grammar of animacy” — a listening that recognizes the vitality of other beings, where water, soil, stone, and wind are not mute backdrops but active presences. Beings of agency. To listen here is to sense entanglement with more-than-human worlds, to perceive atmospheres as alive and communicative. Sound is not only vibration; it is relation. It carries across species, across scales, across materialities. In this way, The Listening Biennial does not simply document the world; it invites us into dialogue with its multiplicities. The partners of this endeavour are not merely human; the lists of possible acknowledgments and thanks extend beyond to what we yet have names for.

 

And then there are the ghosts. Existing in a realm where we test our ability to name. Anastasia Khodyreva speaks of “spectral listening” — a circling, spiraling, stumbling mode that attends to what resists clear capture, what lingers at the edge of perception. Always on the move, relatively to one’s own temporary position. There are voices we strain to hear and absences that weigh heavily despite their silence. Listening here brushes against thresholds: between the living and the disappeared, between the audible and the barely imagined. Some works in the Biennial breathe into and with these liminal spaces and beings, reminding us that what is absent can still resound, that listening can be haunting; that there is always already a bit more, just out of reach.

 

All of this complicates any desire for resolution. Third Listening asks for something different: a willingness to dwell in tension, to sit with contradictions without smoothing them away. LaBelle describes it as “a listening done together, relying on each other to help in acknowledging and overcoming certain listening habits or when listening may fall short.” This “together” is fragile, shifting, provisional. It does not seek harmony, but it does gesture toward co-existence, of meeting and encounter, of visiting — a holding of many worlds at once, even when they conflict, even when they wound. Hosting works of the Biennial can be an attempt to extend this invitation: not to decode, not to master, but to inhabit a field where meaning is co-composed, partial, and alive. 

 

If there is a politics here, it lives in this refusal of closure. Listening becomes a way to inhabit uncertainty collectively, to remain porous to difference while honoring opacity. It holds the possibility of care — not as solution, but as sustained attention. It gestures toward reciprocity, where listening is a breathing: inhaling, exhaling, taking in and giving back, shaping a shared atmosphere of relation. It asks us to rethink where the boundaries of the self begin and end, to sense that our listening is always already entangled in other bodies, other temporalities, other worlds.

 

Organizing, manifesting, and hosting The Listening Biennial is to offer no final statement, no settled narrative of what it contains. It’s to invite whispers and wonderings to be sensed and lingered-with. It unfolds as a constellation rather than a map, a murmuring rather than a manifesto. It opens thresholds instead of conclusions, asking us to linger, to drift, to encounter, to unlearn. To listen here is to be unsettled, to rest, but perhaps also to be reconfigured, regenerated, reoriented — to glimpse other ways of sensing, connecting, inhabiting the fragile weave of existence.

 

And so the question returns: Where are we when we listen? Perhaps nowhere we’ve been before. Perhaps nowhere we can name. Perhaps when we listen, we recirculate the earth’s vastness together with the wind.

 

“”Poetry helps us breathe well” writes Gaston Bachelard. I might say the same for listening. Yet, importantly, such breathing must be emphasized as being bound to air and the environment surrounding – to breathe well is to also give a breath in return, recognizing how wellbeing is dependent on a greater ecosystem of breaths, airs, currents and winds. If listening helps us breathe well, it is in so far as it’s done reciprocally, with compassion and joy, especially in collaboration with the elsewhere, within here. ” — Brandon LaBelle

 

To listen otherwise is to breathe otherwise.
And to breathe otherwise, perhaps, is to live otherwise entirely.