A constellation of interdisciplinary research and artistic and mediation practices concerned with listening, the body, finitude, existential uncertainty and situated knowledge
Horizontal listening is attentive listening that knows how to accompany and protect through different shared aesthetics and ethics
“Listening—in Catalan, escolta—has a clear dimension of receptivity: an attentive and alert listening, ready to respond to what a place asks. (…) We might further extend the word escolta to include escort in the sense of accompaniment and protection. These three attitudes—receptivity, exploration and protection—are essential dimensions of listening.”
Jordi Pigem
The etymology of medicine refers to the “art of healing”, yet not every medical practice truly heals. Modern medicine is characterised not only by its capacity to cure, but also by its ability to produce patients, define pathologies and even stop listening to the person who suffers—and, at times, perhaps to the truth of their experience. The question is how we position ourselves in relation to medical practices that should attend to and know how to listen to the person, not only to their body.
What place remains for human subjectivity within medical care? What does it mean to be a patient today, and how are we attended to and listened to as patients? What forms of veiled violence may operate through diagnosis, and what consequences do they have for bodies and lives?
Some answers may lie in medical practices in which a cure is no longer possible, such as forensic medicine or palliative care: atypical disciplines capable of attending to what cannot be remedied and to what exceeds the human body, language, identity and our own subjectivity.
These are some of the questions that this research brings into dialogue—some of them quite literally with an open heart—in order to speak about the inevitable and listen to what remains unnameable in human experience.
Perhaps it is also good to learn to listen and to be patient.
“In the future, there may be a profession called listener. In exchange for payment, the listener will listen to another person, attending to what they say. We will go to the listener because, apart from them, hardly anyone else will remain to listen to us. Today we are increasingly losing the ability to listen.”
Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other.
Presentation of the “Horizontal Listening” project for En Residència
Documentation Centre, La Panera (Lleida)
Presentation of the “Horizontal Listening” project for the Senior programme
Documentation Centre, La Panera (Lleida)
Presentation of the “Horizontal Listening” project for the University of Lleida
Laboratory for Artistic Creations in the Degree in Digital Design and Creative Technologies at the University of Lleida, in collaboration with Dr Ferran Lega Lladós.
An event forming part of Mikel R. Nieto’s Horizontal Listening research project, in collaboration with La Panera (Lleida) and with support from the Spanish Ministry of Culture through the “Public Grants for the Creation, Research and Production of Artistic Projects in Residence” (2025).
