Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, Italy 1982) lives and works in Berlin (DE), Bergamo (IT) and online. He uses text and sound to question the limits of technology from an existentialist perspective, implementing poetic language in time-based environmental installations, video-essays, performances and spatial interventions made for public and private commissions.
On brewing an ecology of attention in Manila
Dayang Yraola
Talk held on September 15, 2023, Berlin.
We're glad to welcome Manila-based curator and sound art researcher Dayang Yraola to our studio for a conversation on sound art, curating, listening and the localized expression of Tambayan – a Filipino term which literally translates as hanging out. Tambayan is an informal gathering that may be purposeful, but also allows for "anything to happen". Yraola will discuss her curatorial work for the recent Listening Biennial, alongside Biennial collaborator David Wallraf, and how Tambayan became a guiding modality and method. Recording of the talk on September 15, 2023.
Radio Territories was developed in relation to the sound and radio working group at the University of Copenhagen between 2006 - 09. It focuses on questions of radio transmission and territoriality, and the ways in which radio as broadcast media impacts onto sited struggles and community organizing. It includes contributions by: Steve Goodman, Heidi Grundmann, Douglas Kahn, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Ellen Waterman, Anna Friz, LIGNA, Kabir Carter, Sophie Gosselin/apo33, Erik Granly Jensen, Brandon LaBelle, Sophea Lerner, elpueblodechina a.k.a. Alejandra Pérez Núnez, Kate Sieper, James Sey, neuroTransmitter, Marie Wennersten / SR c, and Achim Wollscheid.
We're glad to share this pdf of our first publication as a press. Site of Sound: Of architecture and the ear is edited by Brandon LaBelle and Steve Roden, and was published in 1999. It brings together a range of artists and writers who reflect upon questions of sound and space, as well as document projects in which sound and site are integrated.
Untamed Listening: Reflections on the Undomestication of our Listening Practices
Daniela Medina Poch
[from a lecture performance presented at The Listening Biennial, Berlin, July 2021]
Craving silence and attention desperately, our oversaturated and individualistic western worlds have often overlooked and diminished the relevance of listening practices. Within the fiction of time and space scarcity, listening has come to be misunderstood as a protocol, a commodified service, a counterintuitive instinct, a sign of ‘passivity’, an interruption of our hyper accelerated pace – almost a sacrifice. Very often, listening occurs as a sign of ‘social respect’ and domestication. How can we understand listening as an untamed practice and how to expand the notion of the untamed beyond the binary of civilized and savage through listening? How could we desaturate our environments to reclaim our listening potential?
On practices of Resonance
Ingrid Hoelzl
[from a workshop presented at Errant Bodies studio, December 4, 2021]
As part of a talk and workshop presented at Errant Bodies studio, December 3 & 4, 2021, Ingrid Hoelzl shared her perspectives on the topic of resonance. This included presenting the work of General Humanity, a collective working across theory and performance, as well as a critical reading of Hartmut Rosa's theories of resonance. We share here an excerpt from Ingrid's presentation.
HOW DOES POWER SOUND?
Sonority of Bureaucracy in Everyday Life
Nina Dragičević
[from a talk presented at Errant Bodies studio, October 1, 2021]
Writer and sound artist Nina Dragičević will be holding a talk and related workshop at Errant Bodies studio on October 1 & 2, 2021. She will focus on the sound of power, addressing how bureaucracy performs as a mechanism for the construction, and continuous perseverance of, domination. In what ways does bureaucracy function as an explicit representation and affirmation of power and its ideology? Through her talk and workshop she will consider how bureaucracy is present in everyday life through abstract omnipresence (power itself) + material artefacts (such as forms and clerks), a silent yet screaming force directed at a subordinate population. Following David Graeber’s golden rule of liberalism – the more government claims to be reducing bureaucratic procedures, the more bureaucratic procedures it produces – bureaucracy is seemingly applied universally, yet it primarily coordinates inequality. And this – the domination-drive of bureaucracy and its drive for the formalization of inequality – constructs its specific sonority as well as its specific sonic policies. We shall listen to them and try to articulate the sound of bureaucracy as a mechanism of power through a critical and radical feminist perspective.
By Reason or By Force
Valentina Montero
ISBN: 978-0-9889375-0-5
I left Chile five years ago to try my luck in a Europe which was beginning to smell disaster. Cuts to civil rights at the same time that the process of privatizations, all shielded by a smoke screen erected by the "European crisis", seemed to me a sadly familiar scenario. I felt myself not only as someone coming from the end of the world, but also as someone coming from the future. In Chile the neoliberal model made its first roots over 25 years ago, leaving deep scars in a society that seems going out, just a few years ago, from a hypnotic state characterized by individualism, consumption, defeat and depoliticization of citizens' movements.
In this text I will try to make a historical and critical route describing what were some of the milestones that allowed Chile to become a laboratory of neoliberal thinking, and what were its main consequences in the psychosocial body of Chilean society, damaging one of the most sensitive sectors: education and culture. Within this seemingly bleak outlook, there seems to be a glimmer of hope: the student movement that emerged in 2011. Movement that has been successful across society and aims to generate structural changes in the country.
Yasunao Tone – Noise Media Language
Critical Ear series, vol. 4
ISBN: 978-0-9655570-8-5
(Out of Print)
A pioneer since the early 60s in sound art and digital composition, Yasunao Tone has composed for Merce Cunningham (alongside John Cage) and been a member of the groups Ongaku, Hi-Red Center, and Fluxus. He is unabashedly avant-garde and continues today to engage questions of noise, language, and systems of representation. This indispensable monograph catalogues the artist's career through documentation of seminal projects.
Critical Ear series, Vol. 2: Sound Voice Perform
Christof Migone
ISBN: 0-9655570-7-3
“Christof Migone — Sound Voice Perform” documents the performance, sound, and video works of the Canadian artist. Working since the mid-80s, Migone weaves together a multitude of media, from radio to telephones to digital objects, to form a stunning and highly dynamic practice. Combining an acute sonic sensibility with performative usages of the body, video, and the voice, his work engages corporeal presence with a subtle invasion, unsettling speech and gesture through investigative and theoretical poetics. Including documentation of works and a full length CD of audio works compiled from over the last 15 years including previously unreleased material. With essays by Allen S. Weiss and Brandon LaBelle, an interview with the artist by Martin Spinelli, "Christof Migone — Sound Voice Perform" is the first monograph on this unique artist.
Reality Soundtrack (2003; excerpt)
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Electronic sound for moving sound intervention in public spaces. This sound is to be transmitted over FM radio and taken to the city streets by a group of people carrying portable radios. The original duration is one hour or more. Published as part of Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear, vol. 2, 2011.