Experiences of sound may be understood to weaken us, making us vulnerable to the noisy intensities of worldly contact and each other. Yet, such vulnerability also acts as the basis for personal and collective movement, and through which communities cohere around particular musics, voices, meanings as well as poetic world-making activity. Sound is a vibrant matter and may act as the basis for ecologies of relation and experiential knowledge. Exploring these perspectives, the presentation opens a speculative space for attending to sound as a vibrant matter, one that can contribute to what Adrienne Marie brown terms “emergent strategies”. This includes a consideration of listening, and in what ways listening extends across visible and invisible, human and more-than-human worlds. As such, listening may foster gestures of compassion and care, enabling resistant forms of mutuality and empathy, as well as creative manifestations of community building.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives. In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His latest book in sound studies, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality. https://brandonlabelle.net