Experiences of listening may be understood to weaken us, making us vulnerable to the intensities of worldly contact and each other. As such, listening may act as the basis for gestures of compassion and care, enabling forms of mutuality and empathy. Yet, listening may also lead to fragmentation, rupture, ecstasy. What can be drawn from such intensities listening evokes? And what forms of practice might be found by way of listening’s relational capacities? Exploring questions of listening and relationality, I’ll reflect upon personal experiences and creative practices of social engagement, emphasizing the dynamics of interruption, party habits and radical hospitality. From such perspectives, a notion of more-than-social art will be posed that may allow for other understandings and imaginaries of community life and what it means to find partnerships across social words.
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: Dreamtime X (2022), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His most recent book on sound, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality.