The assembly will nurture conversations and scholarly encounters addressing the dearth of critical engagement with artists and thinkers working outside of hegemonic Eurocentric fields. By attending to the scant presence of the Global South, diasporic, and indigenous artworks, and scholarship in Eurological academia and curating impacting music and sound in the arts, the gathering will focus on practices, aesthetic histories and methodologies of artists and thinkers discursively grounded within the Global South.

This assembly is intended to be a seminal meeting in which the voices of artists, makers, critical theorists, and aesthetic practitioners may enter into mutual dialogue and listening without the need to understand themselves through the assumptions, predilections, and set listening positions of Western concepts and practices. Soundings is intended to be a meeting dedicated primarily to the dialogues between the epistemologies of what we term the “Sonic Global South” – and to critically analyze the aesthetic and discursive hegemonies, institutional biases and parochial canons in medial, sonic and musical discourses and practices. This public assembly will avoid the conventional Western conference formats of a succession of 20-minute lectures and Q/A, leavened by panels, to instead generate care and knowledge from the ground up. Over 5 days of spirited gathering, we will creatively and discursively explore different modes of listening and knowledge-transfer to reflect on different models of encounter through sound and music. Allowing for such variable modes of encounter is central to the decolonial and de-hegemonizing impulse of this gathering.