The Listening Academy
On Elemental Collaboration
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Date
- 10:00 / Cancelled 10:00 / Sold out 10:00 – 18:00
- 10:00 / Cancelled 10:00 / Sold out 10:00 – 18:00
- 10:00 / Cancelled 10:00 / Sold out 10:00 – 18:00
Location
Engawa Space Centro de Arte Moderna GulbenkianFollowing current awareness and commitment to the planet, The Listening Academy, in the frame of the ‘Institution(ing)s’, aims to bring focus to ideas and practices of elemental collaboration. This entails developing research and reflections on what constitutes the elemental and its fundamental presence today.
Organised around a set of daily journeys into elaborated forms of sensing and synchronising with surrounding environments and voices, we’ll collect methodologies and imaginings, elaborating the potentiality of elemental collaboration.
Through the Academy we are concerned to think how elemental collaboration can be integrated within institutional structures: what would an institutional practice be that gestures toward a grammar of animacy? Can we conceptualise a form of biopoetical power in support of holistic forms of reconnection?
This edition of The Listening Academy is envisioned as a hospitable coming together by which to gather individual concerns and practices, questions and rhythms, to cultivate together an animating form of listening.
Participating guests and facilitators include Anna Andrejew, Monaí de Paula Antunes, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Taru Elfving, Pablo Torres Goméz, Brandon LaBelle, Margarida Mendes, and Luísa Santos.
The Listening Academy Lisbon is an open event. We welcome the participation of interested researchers, practitioners, organisers, educators and more. The Academy is structured through a daily program of guided activities and sharing. We welcome participants to attend one or more days. Capacity is limited. Please register, sharing a few details on your own practice and interests in the topic.
Biographies
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Anna Andrejew
Anna Andrejew is an artist–researcher with a background in ethnography and permaculture. Her work begins with the question of how we live together in contemporary society. Through a slow, often ritualistic practice, she invites contemplation in a time marked by speed, grief, and loss – attuning to ecological processes, relational dynamics, and the unfolding rhythms of place. Recent projects include ‘Be Like Water’ (funded by the Dutch Research Council), ‘The Memory of Matter’ (ACPA/KABK), ‘Counter-mapping the Garden’ (West, The Hague), and the publication ‘The First Impression on Your Skin’ (2024).
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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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Margarida Mendes
Margarida Mendes holds a phd in Research Architecture by Goldsmiths University of London. She is a researcher, curator, artist, and educator, exploring the overlap between critical ecology, research methodologies, sound practices and ecopedagogy. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions and experiential works where alternative modes of education and sensing practices may catalyze political imagination and restorative action. She is a tutor in the geo-Design Masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
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Monai de Paula Antunes
Monai de Paula Antunes is an artistic researcher, media & transmission artist and experimental radio-maker. She is co-founder of Radio Otherwise and Archipel Stations Community Radio. Her work engages with the rich materialities and multiple cultural traditions of radio, drawing attention through them to peripheral manifestations of cybernetics and ecology. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Bauhaus University Weimar in the Arts and Design Department.
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~pes
~pes is a collaborative artistic research process between Elizabeth Gallón Droste and Pablo Torres Gómez. Through site-specific investigation, ~pes evokes multimodal encounters with the interspecific weave we are part of. The process questions and exceeds conventional, close-ended representations of planetary ecologies, fostering attunements to the subterranean worlds that constitute them. These encounters and processes take the form of sound walks, listening sessions, installations, written texts and sonic releases.
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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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The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation reserves the right to collect and keep records of images, sounds and voice for the diffusion and preservation of the memory of its cultural and artistic activity. For further information, please contact us through the Information Request form.