The intervention underscores how this mode of co-listening suggests a pluriversal process of personal and community-driven sonic engagements and helps focus on the contemplation and capacity for reciprocity of the listener. This approach generates an inclusive mode of engagement with lived environments, the community and co-habiting others through the production of context-aware intersubjectivity. Departing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s work Listening (2017) and Michel Chion’s listening modes discussed in his book Audio-Vision (1994), A Listening Society offers alternative, decolonial perspectives on intersubjective and collective listenings leaning towards sonic medi(t)ation that encourages listening to the distributed self without making immediate judgments by transcending ontological and epistemological constraints of sound. The talk revolves around listening as a mindful act to compassionately engage with the interconnectedness of a distributed self and the lived environments and bodies that cohabit these environments, namely humans, plants, animals and other sentient beings in a more-than-human society. Challenging the Western modernist idea of listening as immediate meaning-making through deductive conclusions to facilitate everyday navigation, this lecture-performance proposes that listening beyond the self carries emancipatory potential to generate acoustic solidarity and empowerment for societies, providing solace, care and empathy in times of planetary turmoil and crises.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and writer whose work spans exhibition, installation and performance, engaging with themes of environment, migration and decoloniality. He holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from Leiden University and is currently a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen, with an extensive body of publications and several authored books in media arts and sound studies.
https://budhaditya.org
