Listening With is Martyna Poznanska, Nik Forrest, Yifeat Ziv, Walker Tufts, Jacob Eriksen, Cláudia Martinho and Alex De Little. We are a sound-practitioner collective dedicated to exploring and forming sonic ways of becoming-with nonhuman others. It was formed on the basis that in order to survive the present and evolving climate and ecological crises, we need to develop new strategies for existence that celebrate human entanglement with more-than-human others rather than perpetuate those which separate us from them.
We must – to use the language of Bruno Latour – depart from the realm of ideas, return to earth and become ‘Terrestrial’; this an act that requires ‘attaching oneself to the soil on the one hand, [and] becoming attached to the world on the other’.
Sound propagates and entangles; listening requires presence and empathy; surely these are qualities that lend themselves well to reframing human relations with the world around us? We ask: what potentialities might sound and listening offer to return from the realm of these ideas and form vibrant practices that might offer strategies for survival? How might practices of sounding and listening offer possibilities for making kin and celebrating human-nonhuman entanglement?
Through the framework of a ‘Deep Listening Study Circle’ we develop ‘sound strategies for survival’. ‘Sound strategies’ are not ends in themselves, but openings: tactics that seize on the affordances of the vibratory domain to enact and pursue imperatives from our manifesto. They engage with what sound and listening make possible: what is heard, unheard, and imagined through diverse ecologies and assemblages; and the possibilities for sounding that lie within and across these.
Strategies are not necessarily art ‘objects’; they are processes, techniques or approaches that can be used and engaged with by humans and nonhumans (across one or multiple/different locations). They might take the form of instructions or diagrams, technological approaches to listening or recording, embodied practices of sounding or listening, recordings, games, material practices, or anything else. Our definition of a ‘sound strategy for survival is unbounded; what we care about is how strategies pursue the imperatives in our manifesto.
This website acts as a platform to display our collective practice and manifesto, and as a repository for our work.
Our manifesto consists of a list of imperatives that form the motivation behind our work. These imperatives are contributed by all members of the group; they are all grounded in a celebration of human entanglement with more-than-human others, but also reach in subtly different directions. This is reflective of our unity of cause and the divergence of our individual practices.
Listening-With come together to develop sound strategies for: becoming with nonhuman others (ADL);
decentering the ‘anthropos’ (ADL);
breaking with the sound vs listening dualism (JE);
decolonizing the auditory perceptual spectrum, so to be integrated with the more than human (CM);
heightening awareness of difference and interconnection (NF)
rewiring our habitual ways of perceiving the world (MP);
unbecoming oneself (MP/WT);
adapting “otherness” (YZ);
new encounters (YZ);
re-listening to the ‘I’ as a reflection of non-human listening strategies (JE);
de-objectifying objects (JE);
storying science (WT);
an ethics of entanglement : following sound’s unfolding, intra-active becoming to unsettle subject/object relations (NF);
empathy, care (CM);
listening with laughter and wonder (JE)