Opening session – The Listening Academy
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Date
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out Monday, 18:00
Location
Engawa Space Centro de Arte Moderna GulbenkianIn the context of the ‘Institution(ing)s’ programme, ‘The Listening Academy’ creates a welcoming meeting space with the aim of reflecting on ideas around collaboration with natural elements. The opening session, presented by Luísa Santos, will feature the presence of curator and writer Taru Elfving and artist, writer, and artistic director Brandon LaBelle.
This conversation will share situational practices and elementary imaginaries, attempting to answer the following questions: how do we understand the elementary, how can elementary forces and concerns shape our bodies, our thinking and our ethics? From site-sensitive methodologies to poetic and ritualised performances, the Academy will open by evoking elementary presences and a grammar of animacy.
Speakers
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Brandon LaBelle
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist and artistic director of ‘The Listening Biennial’ and ‘Academy’. 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. He is the author of Poetics of Listening (2025), Acoustic Justice (2021), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).
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Luísa Santos
Luísa Santos is an Assistant Researcher, in Culture Studies / Artistic Studies, since 2016 at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. An independent curator since 2009, she is a research fellow at The European School of Governance (eusg), in Berlin; and, since 2023, she is a teaching fellow at the Europaeum, in Oxford. She is the artistic director of the 4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, the Arctic Routes, Southern Ways, and the Institution(ing)s.
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Taru Elfving
Taru Elfving is a Helsinki-based curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. As director of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago she currently leads a research residency program on the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute, University of Turku (FI). She is also a curatorial researcher in the transdisciplinary Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science (SOS) at Åbo Akademi University (FI).
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