Brandon LaBelle

research interests: sound culture, voice studies, radical hosptiality, poetics
affiliation: The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, at University of Bergen
en

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with questions of social life and cultural agency, using sound, performance, text and sited constructions. Since 2011 he works as a Professor at The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen, Norway. He is the leader of the NARP-funded project Social Acoustics: Communities in Movement (2019-2022). He develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, often working in public and with others. This leads to interventions and performative installations, archival work, and micro-actions aimed at the sphere of the (un)common and the unlikely. He is also an active lecturer working with institutions around the world addressing questions of sond culture, sonic and spatial practices, the voice and the politics of listening. Current work focuses on citizen practices, sonic agency, and the aesthetics and politics of invisibility.

 

 

research

research expositions

  • On the question of research: seminars (last edited: 2020) author(s): Brandon LaBelle This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    The series of lectures / seminars looks at questions of artistic research, and aims to reflect upon some of the key terms or pillars defining research culture. Topics such as knowledge, writing, peer review and institutional practices will be unpacked in order to question what particular qualities or perspectives artistic research contributes: what forms of knowledge can one expect from artistic research? In what sense does artistic research understand itself in relation to artistic practice? Is artistic research an art form? What consequences does artistic research have for education and the contemporary art scene? Contending with some of the challenges around the “science of art”, the series intends to open a set of questions as well as productive vocabularies for nurturing research as a creative gesture. It also considers in what ways the notion of the artist as researcher may entail the construction of a unique set of terms or manners, which would include a shift from argumentation to speculation, from reference to gesture, from thesis to aesthetics. From such a view, is the artist researcher to be understood as a type of poetic hacker of research culture, a figure pirating the terms of science? Reflecting upon these perspectives, we will map out what research is from an artistic point of view, and how it may contribute to the project of art in general.
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  • Social Acoustics: Communities in Movement (last edited: 2020) author(s): Brandon LaBelle This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    Social Acoustics: Communities in Movement is an artistic research project led by Prof. Brandon LaBelle at the The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen (2019-2022 NARP-funded). The notion of “social acoustics” is positioned here as a framework for reflecting upon the ways in which listening facilitates collaborative and emergent forms of sociality. Listening is underscored as affording an expanded sense of relationality by which to navigate the material, institutional, and affective constructs of social life, figuring and refiguring oneself in and amongst others, from the human to the nonhuman, the familiar to the unfamiliar. Listening emerges as a question of attention, understanding, and the capacity to hear beyond the legible and the recognized, and is highlighted specifically as means to negotiate one’s situatedness within particular environments or contexts. Through such an understanding, the project poses the “acoustics” as the architectural, linguistic, and social arrangements that support or hinder the work of listening, leading to issues of orientation and resistance, belonging and alienation, compassion and interruption.
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works

  • The Imaginary Republic (01/07/2020)
    Publication: Publication, Errant Bodies Press with the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen, artist(s)/author(s): Brandon LaBelle
    The Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Elena Loizidou terms the “dream-action”: the figurative and poetic staging of world making activity. The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group, and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage with situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Gerald Raunig, Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler, and Manuela Zechner.
  • The Other Citizen (02/08/2020)
    Publication: Publication, Errant Bodies Press, artist(s)/author(s): Brandon LaBelle
    The Other Citizen tracks the hopes and losses, struggles and utopian desires of what the author terms “the floating subjects” of contemporary life. Drawing upon traditions of socially engaged poetics, the work takes aim at the heart of contemporary crisis and exclusionary politics by paying homage to the creative solidarities and pirate imaginaries spanning the globe. Through ten acts, we are led into narratives of friendship and survival, threadbare endurance and tender resistance. From lost teenagers struggling in the maze of neoliberalism to secret gatherings of artistic bandits to those caught in between the borders of nation-states, these emerge as frontiers of invention that, when stitched together, outline the force of an anarchic citizenry. The Other Citizen is a challenging and moving call for exiting the new norm of crisis.