Listening Academy: Cacophony Stories

01.10.2025 - 04.10.2025
With Dror Feiler, Golnoosh Heshmati, Interspecifics, MASIMBA HWATI, Okkyung Lee

as well as Brandon LaBelle, Janine Clark, Alexandra Toland

The Listening Academy is an independent research academy focusing on listening as a philosophical, artistic, social and somatic issue. This entails a relation to performative, sonic, and ecological practices, sensing and sound studies, community organizing, and experimental pedagogy. The Academy offers a generative and nurturing framework for researchers and practitioners to engage in collaborative exchange, as well as workshopping new methodologies and knowledge practices. This includes bringing together individual approaches and work, and creating opportunities for material exploration and building new collaborations.

This edition of the Listening Academy in collaboration with the Artists-in-Berlin program invites ways of listening to cacophony, bringing attention to the troubled stories as well as the precarious methods and movements that search for ways of inhabiting disturbed ecologies and diverse social worlds. Structured around a daily story offered by an invited guest, Cacophony Stories unfolds as an experimental workshop, where we’ll follow each story into a range of collective discussions, material modelings, and listening experiences. One story will open onto other stories, as we gather and share, threading individual concerns and practices into what Tsing emphasizes as the “encounter-based collaborations” so needed today. 

Program
October 1
7pm
Brandon LaBelle: Silent Noise. Meditation on X (Opening Lecture)
Dror Feiler: Performance
followed by a conversation between Brandon LaBelle and Dror Feiler

October 2
2-6pm
Masimba Hwati: Chikwambo – Dark Mutant Cacophonies (presentation + workshop)

October 3
ATTENTION: due to health issues we sadly have to cancel the morning session with Alexandra Toland: Soil Stories. Sonic Meditations with Soil and Stones (presentation). The session with Interspecifics will still take place!
2pm Interspecifics: The Intelligence of Plants (listening session + screening of an experimental cinema version of their piece The Intelligence of Plants, produced during their residency. The presentation will be followed by a talk led by Paloma López.)

October 4
11am Open discussion
12pm Janine Clark: Thinking with Sound. Some Acoustic Experiences of the Russia-Ukraine War (presentation + conversation with Brandon LaBelle)
2.30pm Golnoosh Heshmati: What Is Left to Listen to Now? Collective ways of listening to an archive (presentation + workshop)
7.30pm Okkyung Lee: sori-nahnooghi (소리나누기) (improvisation + dialogue)

daadgalerie, Oranienstr. 161, 10969 Berlin
in English, free admission, all welcome