Please join the event using the link below:
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/319009310322165?p=q9t7krFWhi69aIRMP3
Meeting ID: 319 009 310 322 165
Passcode: Rg7PG2Rn
The Extra Sonic Practice Research Group is pleased to host Listening as a Porous Practice Against Coloniality, an online live conversation bringing together artists and researchers Amy Sharrocks and Jamie Perera to explore listening as an ethical, political and relational practice.
At a time when borders are increasingly enacted through infrastructures of surveillance, extraction and exclusion, this event asks how listening might offer alternative ways of relating - to one another, to environments, and to histories that exceed dominant colonial ways of knowing. Rather than treating listening as passive reception, the discussion approaches it as a porous practice: one capable of unsettling binaries between self and other, human and more-than-human, centre and margin.
The event will begin with short introductions, followed by two provocations:
These will be opened into an unscripted, in-the-moment conversation. The session is intended as a shared commons where participants are invited to think collectively with the speakers, with generous time reserved for collective discussion and questions.
This event forms part of Sounding Borders, a research and practice-led project by the Extra Sonic Practice Research Group that investigates how borders are produced, governed and embodied through sound. Working across sound studies, creative practice and decolonial thought, the project explores how everyday spaces become sonically bordered, inviting participants to critically reflect on migration, belonging and the politics of listening.
Speakers
Amy Sharrocks centres collective, activist art-making practices, questioning systems of governance, equity and social justice. Her practice spans many disciplines and media: live art, film and photography, sonic art, sculpture, drawing, text, jurisprudence, walking and falling. She has spent decades making artworks with people and water, following the ways this extraordinary substance seeps through our days and how the sensory knowledges of water can teach ways to system differently.
Recently she began an Msc in the Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice, in search of words and stamina. Participants interested in exploring Amy's practice are invited to explore artworks available online for free:
WATER SWALLOWS (28mins) - a sonic walk recorded binaurally with over 50 local people in Derbyshire. Roaming through a landscape of springs, caves and reservoirs, this is a wander through personal geologies and histories of the Peak District, exploring the ethics of water and the negotiation of our natural resources in an age of climate change. You are invited to take this artwork for a walk – please use headphones for the best experience.
Enduring Sounds (10 mins) - a conversation between Amy Sharrocks & Thames River (please see the transcript too)
Jamie Perera is a composer, sound artist and producer from East London. His work places the present within deep human and planetary timescales, tracing transformations from extraction to ecology. Through his framework Decolonising Listening, he reclaims listening as an ethical and political act, asking how our relationship to sound might cultivate more plural and equitable ways of being as part of nature. His work has been presented internationally through projects and institutions including Listening Futures, MIT Open Documentary Lab, the Royal College of Art, the London Design Biennale and Liquid Architecture.
Participants interested in exploring Jamie's work in advance can access his Decolonising Listening framework, including a post-reading listening exercise, here:
https://www.jamieperera.com/decolonising-listening
Event Information
Date: Friday 17 July
Time: 12:00–1:30pm (BST)
Location: Online (a joining link will be sent to all registered participants before the event)
Whether you work with sound, migration, decolonial thought, environmental humanities, artistic practice, or are simply interested about listening as a mode of relation, we warmly invite you to join us for this collective conversation. We hope the event will become a space for thinking together about what listening can do, what it makes possible, and how it might help us imagine forms of belonging beyond colonial and extractive logics.