• 00:01 Making imperceptible things and sounds perceptible. What does it mean to bring this into audability? What violences do we do in the translation of these sounds into languages?
  • 01:55 Intro
  • 05:15 I spend a lot of time lying in the ground, listening.
  • 08:55 Sound and geography: how spaces sound.
  • 11:31 Expanded listening: beyond the ear-oriented understanding of listening and the human-anthropocentric perspective.
  • 14:45 Sound and affect: affecting and moving bodies. Weaponisation of sound. Control and security.
  • 17:25 Sonic governance: control of public and private spaces through sound, eavesdropping.
  • 23:35 Understanding what it means to try to do anti-colonial research as a white person, in a region that is literally colonized by the country that you come from.
  • 35:30 Normality in front of a disaster (from personal experience there)
  • 41:34 Being the only white person in a space: naming your position and redistribution of resources.
  • 48:17 Framing a project and respecting what communities decide
  • 57:55 Climate justice
  • 69:34 Creative practice, sound art, radio and academia
22/06/2020 78' 5''
English
"Climates of listening"

Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to them tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. 

AM Kanngieser’s work involves a close, critical, uncomfortable, political listening in which they both explore sound governance and seek to creatively amplify indigenous struggles for social justice in times of climate change. In doing so, they do not for a moment lose sight of the  complexities and contradictions inherent in carrying out field work in the context of white academia, no matter how much anti-colonial theory and how many good intentions go into a project.

Listening, affects, orality permission, recompense, exchange, recording, silences, pauses, natural disasters, and an awareness of when it’s time to leave, are thus key tools in their field research. These prerequisites challenge the protocols and formalities of academic work and resist encapsulation in its language. Anja Kanngieser draws on many strategies to resolve these tensions: from a personal and compulsive archive of field recordings and orality, to documentary essays, sound walks, sound maps, sonification, radio pieces, lectures, workshops, podcasting manuals, and academic literature, always attuned to any possible cracks in the academic corset. 

In this podcast, we become the listeners as AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in  sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.

Sounds from AM Kanngieser's archive. This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Produced in collaboration with Sonic Acts.
Son[i]aAnja KanngieseroralityClimate changeindigenous movementsradiofield recordingslisteninglandscape readingDIWOSonic Acts+listened-june-2020+listened-july-2020Re-Imagine Europe

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