Audio CD
Total time: 54 minutes
Published: 2011
Reading by David Kurs / Los Angeles, 2010
BRANDON LABELLE is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality.
Lecture on Nothing
Brandon LaBelle
Lecture on Nothing is a recording of John Cage’s original text (of the same title) as read by a deaf performer. According to Cage, silence may operate as a positive frame through which to appreciate non-musical sounds and to heighten the experience of listening: by integrating silence into his compositions, Cage sought to allow sounds of the world into the musical experience. Appropriating Cage’s text, this work aims to further explore silence as a complex signifier by relating us to questions of deafness and non-normative forms of hearing. In doing so, the work also considers the act of speech, and the notion of being heard, fundamental to forms of recognition, and how silence is also figures within a politics of listening. From an open space of democratic listening to forms of disciplinary power, silence and understandings of the able ear can be heard to orient the hearing world in particular ways.
