The Listening Biennial Reader – Vol. 2: Infralistening

Following an edition of The Listening Academy held in Bergen, Norway, the second volume of The Listening Biennial Reader brings together contributions from researchers, artists, educators and organizers involved in a range of pertinent initiatives and practices. Framing the publication is the concept of Infralistening which is put forward as a creative, critical methodology. Infralistening is figured as a way of listening-into particular issues, histories, and urgent realities; it is a listening that comes up from below, that shadows certain territories, that wraps itself around sites and struggles, giving momentum to action and intervention. As the essays, interviews, projects and proposals presented in the Reader demonstrate, listening not only enables ways of building community, it moreover aids in fostering practices concerned with reworking dominant knowledge regimes: to foster transdisciplinary meeting points, holistic understandings, and forms of activism by way of an acoustic approach. This allows for critical arguments, engaged work, and poetic research in support of a vitalist, affirmative politics.