„Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‚real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.”
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
With the Acts of Listening project we are aiming to develop a new format of artistic production, emerging from – and imbedded in – the social dynamics of places.
The starting point of our trajectory are the Ideas of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life – in which city is becoming a city only in the moment it is used – in the moment of ‚acting‘ within. Like we change furniture in spaces against the will of the designer, or walk pathways across green-fields (because they are shorter) – the planned city/environment is just a highly constructed abstract.
We want to analyse those codes of the city, transpose, amplify and re-apply them in a certain environment directly and probe the vital role of artistic production which has the ability to occupy spaces, provoke new and different models of using/playing the city beyond the ‘official intended‘ use – or just walk a new line of score in the green.
Listening looks passive, but it is an activity, a ‘silent production’, involving translation, decoding, abstraction, improvisation, the use of memory to recognize and connect elements from other things heard, subconscious filtering… The acoustic world surrounds us like the fabric of architecture in an urban city environment. Listening is a constant interaction.
Instead of the preparation of singular projects we focus on direct interaction with the environment and a processual build up. Different methods of analysis and the developed responses will be carried out in situationist approach, evaluated in direct public feedback. This will be exemplified by a variety of activations of carefully chosen places. The interests and the operational toolkit of the group draw from poetics of listening, text scores and sound poetry, sound ethnography and aural histories, embodiment, materiality and metaphysics of sound to field recording and soundscape composition, classical instrumentation and site specific performance, instrument building and sound installation art, walking practice, sound intervention and radio art. As this project is based on an experimental methodological approach, the way in which the formats and activations will finally emerge will be defined during the joint curatorial process, which constantly documents and reflects the trajectory and catalyse new questions.
The first Acts of Listening series took place as a co production project between Tsonami Festival in Valparaiso 2017 and the 4th edition of Tuned City, in the ancient town Messenia/Greece 2018.
Acts of Listening continues with that approach as an open format in different contexts.