Brandon LaBelle: “Sounding Cosmopoetical Futures”

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 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 formsof mutuality and empathy, as well as the creative evocation of cosmopoetical futures.

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, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). 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. Hispublications include: Dreamtime X (2022), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book in sound studies, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality.

In her research, the focus lies on highlighting how critical listening can establish connections across various acoustic ecologies beyond human-generated sounds. The intertwining of sound and sculpture is a central theme, with sculptures envisioned as dynamic acoustic "sanctuaries" rather than static forms, designed to encapsulate unique sound concepts and recordings. By blurring the boundaries between sound and form, her works invite viewers to immerse themselves in a realm where tangible art transcends into the ethereal, triggering imagination and inviting contemplation of materiality, spatiality, memory, temporality, and expression. Through a feminist lens, emphasis is placed on body autonomy, empowerment, inclusivity, and solidarity, advocating for silenced voices and a broader exploration of acoustic agency. The sculptures utilize sonic memories, archives and materials with sonic qualities, integrating a variety hardwares to create specific sonic experiences within the artwork, ultimately encouraging critical listening and a deeper understanding of our interconnectedness with the environment.

Natalia Domínguez Rangel is a Colombian/Dutch visual artist and music composer currently living and working in Vienna and Amsterdam. Her practice includes making sculptures, installations, and performances, her work delves into the intersection of sound and sculpture.
Domínguez Rangel has exhibited her works throughout Europe and Latin America in various contexts, from festivals, to galleries, museums and interventions in public spaces. She is a docent in the field of sound studies since 2017 at Design Art Technology department of ArtEZ, Arnhem, NL. Domínguez Rangel is also the winner of the music composition prize Tera de Marez Oyens in The Netherlands. Has taught and give lectures at Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (mdw), Die Angewandte and the Akademie der bildenden Künst in Vienna (AT), Kunstuniversität Linz, Skulptur Linz w/Gelitin. Future lectures planned at the department of Sound Art at Columbia University in New York (USA).

Mario de Vega (Born in Mexico City. Lives and works in Berlin)


Through relations between energies and systems produced by induced situations, electronic interfaces and architectonic interventions, Mario de Vega's work evokes listening settings whether the body still listening, or only believes to listen.

His work has been exhibited in Mexico, North America, Chile, South Africa, India, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan and in multiple contexts througout Europe. He has been guest artist and lecturer at City University of Hong Kong, Universität der Künste Berlin, Rijksakademie Amsterdam, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Technische Universität Berlin, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, Kyushu University, écal and Centro among others. 

Since 2020, Mario de Vega is Professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. 

https://mariodevega.info
https://ftp-direct.media

Wir hören nicht nur mit den Ohren, sondern mit dem ganzen Körper – wobei ich mit dem Knie besser höre als mit der Wade.

We don't just listen with our ears, but with our whole body - although I can hear better with my knee than with my calf.

Bernhard Leitner (*1938) has been realising sound-space works since 1968. He studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, worked as an urban designer at the New York City Planning Department and taught as a professor at New York University from 1971. From 1987 to 2005 he was Professor of Intermedia Art at the Angewandte in Vienna. Exhibitions include PS1 New York, Documenta 7, Venice Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe, Museum moderner Kunst Wien, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthalle Bremen, Ars Electronica, Kunstfest Weimar, Tiroler Landesmuseum, Nationalgalerie Berlin im Hamburger Bahnhof, Kolumba Museum Köln. Permanent installations including Ton-Raum TU Berlin, LE CYLINDRE SONORE, Parc de la Villette Paris, Ton-Raum Buchberg, Klangstein Kulturbezirk St. Pölten. His life

After graduating from the Akademisches Gymnasium Innsbruck in 1956, Bernhard Leitner studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology. From 1963 to 1966, he worked at the AUA (Atelier d'urbanisme et d'architecture) and the Atelier Paul Bossard, among others. From 1969 to 1971 he worked as an urban designer in the Department of City Planning in New York, and from 1972 he was Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Urban Design-Humanistic Perspectives study programme at New York University. From 1982 to 1986 he lived as a freelance artist in Berlin. From 1987, he took over the masterclass for cross-media art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (emeritus status in 2005).