Are there generous, permeable, decelerated listening attentions that can soften or attack the categorization and difference perpetuated by capitalist, colonial, white-supremacist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist relations? Listening positionalities and perceptions are informed by identities, experiences, beliefs, and their intersections. Non-extractivist listening asks us to notice our noticing and work from there. As AM Kanngieser writes: «Listening attention might mean to embrace the impossibility of receiving truth,» and therefore «embrace listening as being present with whatever comes.» 

This event for the Polylistening Club is hosted in person by Aio Frei and Cannach MacBride, with a recorded spoken contribution by AM Kanngieser («listening as taking leave») and a sound piece by Hong-Kai Wang («Fuengu»). We invite you to attune to a shared, attentive listening session where we will listen to the contributions and each other, talk, write, eat, and move a little. Attached you find an invitation for a preparatory listening exercise.

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Cannach MacBride
is an artist. They are currently doing their PhD at CRiSAP with a project on more-than-sonic listening. With curator Taraneh Fazeli, they are co-editing a book called Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying on expanded understandings of accessibility in the arts. Recent writing appears in The Climate Justice Code (Casco Art Institute, 2023) and is forthcoming in As for Protocols(Vera List Center for Art and Politics/Amherst Press, 2024). They teach writing and research methodologies on the MA Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. 

AM Kanngieser
is a geographer, sound artist and Research Fellow in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. Their practice engages listening and attunement to approach how people collectively determine conditions of liberation and care in the face of ecocide and environmental change. Kanngieser is a co-founder of the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures and works in collaboration with Oceania-based anti-colonial storytellers, artists and grassroots organisers. They are the author of Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds (2013) and Between Sound and Silence: Listening towards Environmental Relations (forthcoming), and have written for a range of interdisciplinary journals. Their audio work has been commissioned by Documenta 14 Radio, BBC, ABC Radio National, The Natural History Museum London, and Deutschland Radio, amongst many others, and has been reviewed in publications including The Wire, Quietus, Transmediale, Outline and Art Quarterly. https://amkanngieser.com/

Hong-Kai Wang
Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Taipei, Taiwan and holds a PhD in Practice degree from Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She works across exhibition making, performance, publication, and workshop that involve collective, pedagogical, and embodied practices of sociality. Wang research-based practice is informed by the unceasing tension between languages, ideologies, identities, and knowledge regimes. By attending to and contending with the questions of auditory perception and the politics of knowing, Wang’s work seeks to reveal different modes of attention, further conceiving of emergent time-spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, formations of knowledge, and production of desire. https://www.w-h-k.net/

Aio Frei
is a non-binary sound artist, relational listener, sonic community organizer, collaborator, sonic researcher and graphic designer based in Zürich. They co-founded the experimental record- and artbook store OOR Records, and co-curated OOR Saloon, a production context for queer-feminist listening practices.
Since many years they are deeply interested in questions concerning «ethics of listening» – in socio-political, environmental, embodied and queer practices of listening within its situated contexts, emancipatory possibilities within the sonic realm, forms of non-verbal communication/improvisation and relational composition. Aio's transdisciplinary practice interweaves sonic organizing, electroacoustic and communal forms of composition, workshops and graphic design/printed matter. They organize experimental and discursive audio formats and collaborate on listening performances and collective listening settings. 

About the Poly Listening Club
An public event series organized by Barbara Preisig and friends for the Institute for Contemporary Art, Department Fine Art, Zurich University of the Arts
https://www.zhdk.ch/veranstaltung/54249