with Laura Benítez Valero,  Brandon LaBelle, Vanessa Lorenzo, Óscar Martín, Robertina Šebjanič

In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? How does the materiality of sound affect listening and its capacities? What types of collaboration may be configured from working with biomaterials and sound? Do these bio_sonic_agencies open up other possible spaces outside a visual or logocentric regime? The radio work Bio_Sonic_Agencies follows such questioning through a focus on matters of air. Air is highlighted as an elemental force that moves across human and more-than-human bodies, and that enfolds in its rather invisible and light presence a range of material expressions and dynamics. From the microscopic to the macroscopic, air is radically invasive, affirming, influential; it is profoundly internal, filling the lungs with its molecular support while passing across the planet in atmospheres and weather streams. It transitions through states of materialization and imaginaries, from gaseous ethers and contagions to radiophonic signaling and aerial topographies – air is a deep and dangerous carrier. Bio_Sonic_Agencies is the result of a collaboration between a group of artists and philosophers who work with biomaterials, ontological entanglements, sound and speculative listening. Through a process of shared discussion and sonic experimentation, the collective work captures a series of encounters with matters of air.

Produced for Kunstradio, Vienna, 2021.

Bio_Sonic_Agencies

with Catalina Tello, Kailin Badal Thomas, Lily Errant, Brandon LaBelle, Pamela Moraga

Are we not moved by the things we hear? These energetic intrusions and ambiences that touch the skin, vibrate the air, evoke relations. Is there an alien force intrinsic to sonic experience and the currents of sound? Currents that pass across subjects and objects, and that give way to a multiplicity of rhythms, vocalities, gestures, scrapings. The work circles around listening as the basis for movement and transformation, and that incites a mutational process in bodily, cellular, social and passionate ways. The effects of listening – of what we listen to, or what demands to be heard, what touches and resounds – come to shape something of the body, orienting habits, defining rhythms, interrupting views, vibrating the heart, putting us somewhere between ourselves and others. Such perspectives find echo in Catherine Clément’s meditation on “syncope”, which she utilizes as a theoretical framework in approaching questions of subjectivity. Drawing from the musical concept, Clément poses syncope as a process of delay, a type of fainting or form of loss, as well as recovery and renewal: to fall or lag behind, then to recover the tempo. Never back to oneself entirely, but rather, placed somewhere else, syncope is suggestive for appreciating “life’s nocturnal dimension”. A trembling, a sensitivity, a sympathy, or what Clément describes as an eclipse of individuality.

Following these perspectives, the work is developed through a set of physical actions with objects, materials, surfaces, elements, attuning to those things that support, touch, pressure, sustain and influence the body: alien things, nonhuman things, elemental things. Performed and improvised by a group of participating artists, the work listens by way of the hand, the knee, the tongue, listening across and through things so as to collaborate with all these forms and forces that surround, and that make of the body a partner, an enemy, a substance, a host.

Developed and produced for Kunstradio, Vienna, as part of Social Music II, 2021.

Alien Phenomenology

With Miguel Buenrostro, Giordano Cruciani, Daniela Gentile, Mathias Klenner, Brandon LaBelle, Maria Frederika Malmström, Elif Gülin Soğuksu, Shlomit Strutti, Sandra Volny, Matteo Zoccolo.

A collective improvisation as part of a creative research academy on questions and practices of listening.

Can listening be a tool?
For care and concern? For possible worlds?
How can a space support experiences of togetherness?
How to challenge geometries of power by listening?
Where is the border between questioning and changing, art and activism?
How to counteract the commodification of participation? Are there ways of withdrawing while fostering modes of becoming-with?
How to create times and spaces for reflection and mutual exchange?
For attuning across bodies and things, each and other?
Can we resist through states of unproductivity? Through forms of doing-nothing?

The publication documents a collective improvisation recorded on July 22, 2021 at Studio dB Berlin, and developed as part of The Listening Academy, a creative research academy focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social and somatic issue. It was enacted by a group of participating researchers, artists and musicians, brought together from different parts of the globe through a mutual interest in radical listening.

The Listening Academy

Writing Aloud is an anthology focusing on the relationship of language to sound, writing to music, and brings together a highly diverse collection of essays, interviews, meditations, visual projects, text-sound scores and audio by some of the leading individuals in the field of cultural and performance studies, experimental music and contemporary art. Edited by Brandon LaBelle and Christof Migone.

Yasunao Tone, Man'yoshu#16

Jocelyn Robert, En Plein Champ

Alexandre St-Onge, Bouche D'eau En Nombre D'oimpossibilites Particulieres

Marina Abramovic, Freeing The Voice

Errant Bodies is an independent press publishing writings and works on sound culture, spatial arts, experimental performance and poetic and political thought since 1995. This includes an ongoing series of audio releases documenting diverse forms of audio experimentation and research. Originally launched as a literary arts journal in Los Angeles in 1992, Errant Bodies works at supporting diverse approaches and voices from a range of cultural fields and communities. This includes organizing events and research through its related studio in Berlin, as well as through collaborations with academic and non-academic institutions.

Errant Bodies

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