Assemblies of Listenings and Voices Across the South

21.-25. August 2022
Akademie der Künste, Berlin

SOUNDINGS is a 5-day gathering at Akademie der Künste Berlin (and online) on 21 – 25 August 2022. The assembly will nurture conversations and scholarly encounters interested in addressing the current dearth of critical engagement with and the artistic un-presence in hegemonic Eurological academia and curatorial settings. The focus is on practices, aesthetic histories, artists and thinkers who come from or engage with discourses, reception formats and artistic practices that do not draw on or do not situate themselves within or with deference to these hegemonic Eurocentric contexts. It is intended to be the first-ever meeting in which voices of artists, makers, critical theories and aesthetic practitioners from the outside of the Eurocentric fields may enter into mutual dialogue and listening without the need to understand themselves through the assumptions and predilections of Western concepts and practice. It is meant to be a meeting dedicated primarily to the dialogues between the epistemologies of what we term the “Sonic Global South” – and to critical analyses of aesthetic and discursive hegemonies, institutional biases and parochial canons in medial, sonic and musical discourses and practices. This sonic assembly will avoid the usual conference format of a succession of 20-minute lectures and Q/A, leavened by panels. In these 5 days with each day dedicated to a question, new modes of listenings, sharing and caring will be generated from the ground up together with the participants in ways that reflect their own models of encounter, sociality, knowledge-transfer, listenings and deliberations – from multiple simultaneous one-to-one dialogues to the collective fashioning of proverbs – allowing for such variable modes of encounter is central to the de-hegemonizing impulse of this gathering.