One side of Social Acoustics focuses on developing research and material projects that advance questions of socially engaged art practices and cultural agency, and how these may contribute to understandings of community. Led by Brandon LaBelle, and in collaboration with partners including Lilia Mestre and Rayya Badran, research on community draws from the topic of acoustics as the basis for considering struggles over belonging and recognition, where hearing and being heard allow for deeply affective and relational capacities. Here, acoustics acts as a discursive and material framework, where struggles over place, identity, and shared freedom become a process of reorientation and polyvocality: a sounding out that works to retune and recompose a given social or institutional order. In this sense, social acoustics is posed as a creative and critical platform by which to work through the performativity of compassion and con-sensuality as well as interruption and cacophony that sound and listening often enable. The research works across artistic and activistic methodologies and knowledges, and looks to foster artistic situations that may work to support an emergent sense of community. This takes shape by constructing experimental and pedagogical scenes that can act as arenas of poetic rehearsal, where expressions of temporary co-existence, imagination, or pirate creativity may be staged.
Inoperative Community:
Research onto questions of community take as an initial guide what Jean-Luc Nancy terms “the inoperative community”, which is to be understood as “the passionate sharing of singularities”. Such a conceptualization underscores community as what may embody an ethics of radical openness or a process of transindividuality. Guiding the research will be the desire to question how the public sphere is understood as one of visibility and legibility. Instead, attention is drawn to the acoustic, and what Dimitris Papadopoulos terms “imperceptible politics”: the ordinary practices that may slowly reorder situations of insecurity or injury through an ontological interruption or “worlding endeavor”. As such, inoperative communities come to manifest the public sphere less as declarations of identities and more as diverse states of ecstatic becoming. From such a view, activities are developed that traverse a range of settings, leading to a concerted intersection of transversal partnerships.