The Listening Academy Basel

Brandon LaBelle
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an artist, media practitioner, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, creative technologies and research, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, race and decoloniality. Chattopadhyay has received numerous residencies, fellowships, and international awards. His sound works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and released by Gruenrekorder (DE) and Touch (UK). Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in the areas of media art history, theory and aesthetics, cinema and sound studies in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of four books: The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an MA in New Media from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University. https://budhaditya.org/

As part of the program for continuing education, «The Listening Academy Basel» is a research academy aimed at investigating listening as a creative and critical practice, one that can assist in fostering greater relationality and mutuality, as well as co-learning and co-creation. Emphasising the potentiality of listening as a relational act, the Academy invites participants to join for a week-long summer camp where we’ll discuss, explore, listen, forage, and attune to a range of critical topics. This includes a focus on “listening and wildness”. Wildness is highlighted here as the rhythms, encounters and symbiotic processes that define living things. From the biophonic soundings of entangled planetary life to the interdependencies that link bodies, wildness is positioned as a framework for listening beyond singularity. Instead, we’ll bring concentration to the extremely complex world of sound and listening, asking in what ways sonic materiality and experience are generative of multiplicity and biodiversity. This includes a consideration of urban wilds as found in the city of Basel, and the potential cross-over between gardening and listening, gleaning and improvising, composting and composing.

If we could rest our ears on this troubled earth, what could we hear? Can listening become a context-aware sensing act that takes place beyond the here and now? The immediate navigational judgments we ascribe listening with may often reduce the potentialities of the listening act. Can we imagine listening as a slow process of self-attunement to probe into the historical, environmental, post-cognitive or philosophical resonances felt on the surface of this damaged earth? What begins as an expanded process of attuning across oneself and others, may become a fertile promise of empowerment at the Listening Academy Basel. Listening is then not only a humanistic faculty of sensing within the context of everyday survival, but also a method for nurturing greater planetary co-existence with more-than-human others. In this Academy, Listening emerges as an act that can impact on dominant structures and systems that work to exclude and extract, allowing for alternative practices. 

The target group includes MA/PhD candidates as well as alumni from the Humanities and the Arts. For example, artists, designers, makers, musicians, composers, and film sound practitioners.

From questions of planetary co-existence and radical hospitality to collaborative artistic creation and poetic sensing, the Academy will open a shared space for exchanging knowledge and practices. Through lectures from invited guests, reading and listening sessions, as well as collaborative material investigations, we’ll work at wilding new forms of artistic research.

The days will be structured around morning seminars followed by afternoon group investigations, with a focus on fieldwork in the city. Concentration will be given to probing relations between sound, listening, foraging, urban wilds, and gestures of reciprocity. On a number of evenings, we will also plan to cook together, using this as a freer experimental space for hanging out, bringing our foraged materials into a collective soup of food and sound, feasting and listening. There will also be two evening events (“wild sessions”) planned at HEK House of Electronic Arts Basel, bringing guest artists and participants together in sharing work. Possible guests include, Jason Kahn, Svetlana Maras, Aio Frei, among others.

Proposal of ½ page describing the project or question the participant would like to work with, along with a one-page resume describing their previous works and interests.

More information: https://listeningbiennial.net/about