Conference – Soundings 2022

Assemblies of Listenings and Voices Across the Souths

Akademie der Künste Berlin Hanseatenweg
August 21-25, 2022

SOUNDINGS is a 5-day gathering that will nurture conversations and scholarly encounters interested in addressing the current dearth of critical engagement with and the artistic un-presence in hegemonic Eurological academia and curatorial settings. The focus is on practices, aesthetic histories, artists and thinkers who come from or engage with discourses, reception formats and artistic practices that do not draw on or do not situate themselves within or with deference to these hegemonic Eurocentric contexts. It is intended to be the first-ever meeting in which voices of artists, makers, critical theories and aesthetic practitioners from the outside of the Eurocentric fields may enter into mutual dialogue and listening without the need to understand themselves through the assumptions and predilections of Western concepts and practice. It is meant to be a meeting dedicated primarily to the dialogues between the epistemologies of the “Sonic Global South” – and to critical analyses of aesthetic and discursive hegemonies, institutional biases and parochial canons in medial, sonic and musical discourses and practices.

This sonic assembly will avoid the usual conference format of a succession of 20-minute lectures and Q/A, leavened by panels. In these 5 days with each day dedicated to a question, new modes of listenings, sharing and caring will be generated from the ground up together with the participants in ways that reflect their own models of encounter, sociality, knowledge-transfer, listenings and deliberations – from multiple simultaneous one-to-one dialogues to the collective fashioning of proverbs – allowing for such variable modes of encounter is central to the de-hegemonizing impulse of this gathering.

Take a look at the full programme here.

Steering Committee:

Oladele Ayorinde, Sandeep Bhagwati, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Murat Gürel, Sandipan Nath, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Bhavisha Panchia, Glaucia Peres da Silva, Deniza Popova

More information about the event:

Conversation with members of the Steering Committee (Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Glaucia Peres da Silva)

The Akademie der Künste and the inm – intiative neue musik berlin / field notes have been organizing the “Curating Diversity” conferences since 2019, with the Ultima Festival Oslo and the Sounds Now project joining in 2020. After an open space in 2019 and a first hybrid symposium in 2020, which were primarily led by the institutions, an advisory board set the thematic priorities and format for the 2021 symposium. At the Soundings gathering this August, the power in the decision-making process shifts once again: content and planning are the responsibility of the Steering Committee and the network that has emerged around the initiative. AdK, inm / field notes, Ultima and Sounds Now Network now support the project as silent partners.