The Art of Listening @STRP

_highlights

🖤 attending a "deep listening" festival on the next day after submitting my master's programme thesis, that was inspired by Pauline Oliveros!
_half of the expo was placed in a Mall in the city centre, the other one - in an underground parking lot nearby the train station

★ oyayi by kwago

one of the concrete-like boxes with the chip and speaker

Based on the belief that deep listening is a collective act, artist collective KWAGO organised collaborative poetry sessions in a women's prison in the Philippines. These sessions were inspired by Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening practice and traditional forms of pre-colonial spoken poetry. As the captives recited poems, KWAGO recorded their heartbeats.

Oyayi is the Filipino word for ‘lullaby’, while pintig at himig sa bilibid translates as 'heartbeat and voice in prison'.

_setup - 11 concrete boxes with speakers positioned in a circle
_the imprisoned voices were coming from a concrete box and heard through a small speaker outside of each box
_the visitor could go inside the circle and listen to all the voices altogether, or go around and focus on each, one by one
_loved the connection between the physical setup of the space, the symbolic representation of the voices inside the boxes (the chip, connected to the speaker) and the small speaker placed outside the box
_listening to all of their voices altogether felt intense, chattering; there was a sense of urgency, overlay
_it felt good to be able to walk around and be inside the circle (comparing to another work at the expo where the objects were also placed in a circle, but the visitor was an outsider of it and couldn't go in)

★ raumklang by zeno van den broek & robin koek

Raumklang is a site-specific project that allows you to explore sound architecture by perceiving 4-dimensional objects through hearing. Your perspective and auditory experience constantly change as you make your way around these invisible sonic objects, creating your own unique soundtrack composed by movement.

_you walk around an empty room with some smoke and dimmed blue light
_you get a cute 3D-printed backpack with the tracking device inside and a set of headphones; while you walk around the space, you can hear different sounds, activated by your location in the room
_experiencing space and objects through sound only (invisible objects)
_minimalistic setup, individual experience

_about

STRP Festival 2023: The Art of Listening

From 13 to 16 April 2023, STRP Festival dives deeper into the theme of 'The Art of Listening'. In our society we prefer seeing to hearing and speaking to listening. Self-expression is what drives thinking, science and our social media. Now that social media serve as a megaphone for the masses, and anyone can voice their opinion at any time, STRP wonders who is left to listen. How can we revalue and reclaim the art of listening? With this question in mind, STRP is looking to collaborate with artists, designers, thinkers, and makers in order to translate the theme of Listening into original, critical and innovative works or scenarios for the future.

In STRP Expo, national and (inter)national artists present 14 mostly new works that explore listening as a method. What would an environment for active and empathetic listening look like? How can we train our ears and hearts to be more receptive to our fellow human beings, to plants and animals, to nature? All artists are inspired by the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros.

_links

▶▶ festival webpage