Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

• Decolonial Listening and the Politics of Sound: Water, Breathing and Urban Unconscious (2023) author(s): Rodrigo Toro and Donovan Hernández Castellanos published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This essay is based in the urgency of questioning the coloniality of being and power (Quijano, 2014), present in the hegemonic aural regime. It is based on two pieces: Wet Season / Dry Season (2021), a sound installation by the collective of Cuban visual artists Celia-Yunior that was presented at the Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; and Breathe (2020), an interdisciplinary piece combining dance, literature, sound and video.
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• Collective listening as survival: how to be not okay together (2023) author(s): Rajni Shah published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  The writing that follows (interspersed between other articles) is a series of personal reflections on “listening” – a term which, for me, refers to an embodied attentive state, including but not limited to the ears. I write from my own experiences as a trans non-binary person of colour and reflect specifically on the ways in which listening work relates to anti-racist and anti-colonial work. Within the writing, certain words are hyperlinks. These are offered as moments of dialogue – moments where you are invited, if you wish, to read other texts that are in relationship with the particular word, phrase, or idea that is linked. At the end of the section titled “4. Portals,” there is a short list of links to artists and authors who are directly mentioned in the text as well as a list of further references in case they are of interest.
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• Migration and Listening: Political Life in Motion (2023) author(s): Ximena Alarcón and Ed McKeon published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Boundaries, thresholds, and limits characterise both political geography and the politics of voice and listening. The effect of hearing yourself speak, as Derrida noted, is foundational for sovereignty, self-identity, and relations to others. In this conversation, we explore experiences of border crossings and passing across limits through migration and movement alongside corresponding encounters with Deep Listening. Alarcón reflects on her experience of migration from Colombia to the UK and how this also involves ‘speaking and travelling in-between different languages’. McKeon draws on experience of ‘losing’ his accent, the voice’s marker of political identity. For both of us, Deep Listening has become an essential resource to forgo the desires of returning ‘home’ or arrival with their visa privileges and passports of legitimised status. Migration and movement are instead embraced for their potential to constitute another practice of centring and of balance without fixed and immovable boundaries. We aim to articulate this politics of listening and voice not through conventions of debate and polemics, defending ideological territories, but through exchange in dialogue, in what passes in the movement between us.
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  Sounds of the Balkan - Editorial (2022) author(s): Diana Grgurić published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Sounds of the Balkan - Editorial
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  Listening against "The Transition" (2022) author(s): Theodore Teichman published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This is an archive of places, but it is even more an archive of the materiality of listening. This constitutes a larger inquiry and fascination with the listening as performance and the various “instruments” and “scores” that shape or encode this sonic event of the performance of the image. In particular, this project uses this arts-based research approach to engage critically with the concept of "The Transition," which has shaped the geography and imaginary of Ex-Yugoslavia. This is a collection of recordings made and then composed into soundscapes between September 2018 and May 2019 in Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Through these techniques I propose an approach soundscape practices to engage materially the constitutive world of listening and the narration of time-worlds.
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  Soundscapes of Stalinism: Acoustical Experiences in Bucharest in the 1940s and 1950s (2022) author(s): Błażej Brzostek published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  In this paper I point out phenomena related to the perception of sounds in Bucharest during the Stalinist period (1948-1956). I refer to personal accounts – diaries and memoirs – of representants of the city’s former social elite, sentenced to various deprivations under the communist regime. I focus on descriptive accounts of sounds in the city’s everyday life. The sounds are treated as an expression of the mental experiences of their listeners. In the sources collected here, the key experience is a reduction of agency, associated with existential anxiety.
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