Photos: Johannes Berger/Sonic Topologies, 2022.
listening with – a sequence of attunement exercises
aio frei & franziska koch
site specific 4-channel soundpiece/performance
old botanical garden zürich
sonic topologies festival
eth zürich, 2022.
soundpiece:
texts & composition: aio frei, franziska koch
voices: tara lasrado, sally schonfeldt, izidora l LETHE
sound editing: franziska koch
text editing: izidora l LETHE
performance:
franziska koch, andré veigas pereira, tara lasrado, aio frei
handout/exercises:
text editing: aio frei
graphic design/risography: aio frei
«All der Wind, der vom Gedicht her weht, ist das Gedicht selbst, das sich regt.» Edouard Glissant
«What might improvising with listening positionality feel like? What shapes may improvising with listening positionality take? And what might the limits with such improvisation be? I understand this improvisation as a movement between three words: giving, taking and notice. We might say that naming aspects of positionality is about noticing our noticing, and noticing how we notice.» Dylan Robinson
Aio Frei and Franziska Koch will continue their recent work around listening-attention and propose a sequence of poetic listening-exercises to be practiced with the audience in form of a four-channel audiopiece. The exercises ask for a practice of «gathering as a form of shared holding attention» (Rajni Shah) that underlines «listening as sensing relation». (AM Kanngieser) The exercises ask the audience to meditate on their own listening-positionality and the way that their listening may be shaped by their own subjectivity, ancestry and specific relationship to place while attuning to the environment. The exercises follow critical feminist traditions of awareness-raising through embodied listening and postcolonial-queer thought of listening-attention. The artists wish to invite for reflection and practice of ones’ own listening-positionality as a work toward inclusive listening practices within and beyond the festival.
Furthermore, the research-based work asks for a becoming-aware of the old botanical gardens’ entangled temporalities that hold various forms of human, non-human and inanimate knowledge, as well as layers of different histories such as those of militarisation, regional (medieval) naturopathy/herbology and colonial history (ethnological museum, botany, zoology). «Listening with» thematizes the construction of eurocentric knowledge systems and its colonial entanglements in the natural sciences since the 15th century, focussing specifically on scientists connected to the old botanical garden zürich and heteronormative and colonial constructions of theories of anachronicity.
Accessibility needs: We will provide a print-out with all the authors, texts and exercises used in the audio piece, so it’s suitable and possible to join for people with diverse embodied experiences of hearing and listening.
Listen to preparation exercise here
Read the full text script here
«Listening with», Stereomix, 32:14
«Voice 1: Re-visit the sonic memory that is emotionally significant to you, that you sat with in the earlier exercise. Let it affect you in the present. Now, incude listening to what’s around you in this moment. With both of those soundings in mind, travel back to that moment in the past. Feel the past and the present, at the same time. Feel the present into your memory.
Voice 2: 1834: First director of the botanical garden Zürich. 1865: Publishes «Die Urwelt der Schweiz», «The Prehistoric World of Switzerland». Widely recognized theory. The country‘s geological and botanical past. An asynchronous arrangement of objects from different time periods. Fossilized remains from the Alps and contemporary animal and plant findings from overseas. Led to the Thesis: Ancient Switzerland was once a tropical world. Inhabited by insects and plants in a hot and humid climate. As time progressed, the climate became more «temperate». Leading to the emergence of more highly developed creatures and plants. More temperate. Climate: Progress, Cultural evolution, Interfolding of Biology and Anthropology. Colonial interfolding of space and time. The inequality between those, whose history is reconstructed and those who serve as its fossils. Fabulating advanced European civilisation versus backward societies. An anachronistic space within a synchronous palimpsest including people, cultures, geographies, landscapes, flora and fauna. Moveable along different points on a historical axis of progress. The Implimentation of «tropes», like overseas then and the alps now, have remained static. Denial of simultaneity. Panoptic time.
Voice 3: Us winds, us winds. We are always changing beside you in time.»
Excerpt from script of «Listening with»
Aio Frei & Franziska Koch are both sound artists and sonic community organisers. They are part of the founding collective of the experimental record store OOR Records, and curate the programme of the community based, queer-feminist soundart-space OOR Saloon since 2014. Both are deeply interested in questions concerning the ethics of listening – in socio-political, environmental, embodied, and queer practices of listening within their situated contexts and in giving them attentive communal space to breathe. Aio’s practice consists of listening workshops, collaborative research-based listening performances, essayistic djing, semi-modular synthesis, various forms of microphony, electroacoustic improvisation and graphic design/editing of art and sound related publications. Franziska is interested in the multi-layered aspects of practices, methods, coexistences, theories and technologies and is committed to social and political approaches and engaged pedagogy. This results in sound performances, sound translations, and exhibition formats, based on collective and experience-based practices. She teaches artistic practices at Zurich University of the Arts.