I have been teaching listening in social centers, free schools and universities. Each iteration is location-specific, drawing upon a core pedagogical method that becomes adapted to the specific environmental, political, socio-spatial and temporal parameters of the location. Each workshop also generates a booklet.
This practice considers listening as a social making. It uses listening to explore tensions between different ways of making sense of space. The process involves intellection, analysis and language, but making sense (as in sense-ing) also refers us to perception, affective capacity, to knowing through the body. How does sense-ing involve an apprehension of the world, but also an action upon it? How is this process internal, the manifestation of the world in our bodies as sensation, as well as intersubjective – relational, communal, social? These are political questions; they refer to the mutual production of subjectivity and of dominant cartographies, but also to collective imaginative capacities that have radical transformative force. They insist on the possibility that our understandings of space can be open to resistant reshaping.
Past iterations include a postgraduate seminar at the Critical, Curatorial Cybermedia program in Geneva, Switzerland, where we focused on critical geographies of the WTO headquarters; a self-organized workshop at the Boeing headquarters in Chicago; a two year course on the underground rivers, colonial settlement and cycles of real estate speculation around Sulfur Springs in Tampa, FL; an art exhibition curated by Michelle Hyun at Bard College
Here We Are: Listening for Beginners (New York)
A Listening workshop in three sessions, in three different locations; my contribution to Non-Cochlear Sound curated by Seth Kim-Cohen. The workshop was accompanied by a collectively drawn wall diagram in the gallery, charting the experiences and questions of workshop participants in terms of attention, space and power.
Three Lessons in Advance of Prefigurative Listening (with Jérôme Grand)
Drawing upon shared interests in the political and social histories of writing systems, Jérôme Grand and I developed a visual/text script for performance for the Romanian magazine and collective Vector. This kind of scribing raises questions about orality and literacy (the contingent shaping of listening, speaking, reading, writing and remembering), and about the process whereby co-operative, oral and embodied knowing becomes enclosed through documentation, recording, writing. (Commissioned by Vector Magazine for Frieze Art Fair). Click on the image for our published piece.
