In any research worthy of the name, listening and ethics reorient us in the face of contingencies
A series of interdisciplinary investigations and collaborative artistic projects in which listening becomes a palliative practice and the body of the research.
“The body without organs is not opposed to the organs, but to that organisation of the organs called the organism”
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
This research examines the palliative capacity of the act of listening in situations of existential uncertainty.
Its aim is to place listening at the centre as a means of offering consolation and learning how to accompany people through moments of fragility and vulnerability, as well as through processes related to pain and loss. These processes are understood as spatial, acoustic, temporal, epistemological and ecological-affective sites from which different forms of knowledge can be produced and transmitted.
The following pages present the precedents and the different parts that have emerged through various research processes. Together, they form a constellation of practices, experiences and listening devices devoted to cultivating attention in the service of critical thought and shared reflection. Each is an organ of the same body: they connect, affect and sustain one another. This open relationship gives form, continuity and meaning to the corpus of Escucha Paliativa.
These projects investigate and enact an ethics and aesthetics of palliative listening, examining its limits and the ways it may exceed them in order to give voice to contemporary social and ethical silences. What we leave outside our listening range, even when it remains within the perceptual field of hearing, reveals the limits of our attention and our capacity to listen, and calls our ethical responsibility into question, both individually and collectively.
The question may still be the same:
What does it mean to listen to the pain of others?
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Anthropological Repertoire Of Vulnerabilities
A personal archive of sound publications that address human vulnerability from different perspectives, questioning policies of listening and silencing.
The Last Listening
A research project awarded a prize in 2021 and subsequently developed through two artistic residencies.
Petit Bardo
A series of sound works in which sound artists engage with the act of listening in situations of existential finitude.
A Funeral March For The First Cosmonaut
A sound installation featuring an ephemeral radio transmission of Etel Adnan’s work of the same name, translated into Morse code.
Gravitas
Choreographic research focused on the body and listening at their maximum inclination: horizontality and dreams as ways of sensing gravity.
The Belliphonic Mind
Sound research and musical production on the sonic memory of armed conflict.
Horizontal Listening
Artistic research and cultural mediation on listening, the body, attention and situated knowledge, developed in educational and cultural contexts.
“Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation.”
John Dewey
Collaborating institutions, projects and collectives that have supported these projects:
