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Communities in Movement is an artistic research project led by Prof. Brandon LaBelle at the The Art Academy, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen (2019-2022 NARP-funded). The notion of “social acoustics” is positioned here as a framework for reflecting upon the ways in which listening facilitates collaborative, collective, and emergent forms of sociality. Listening is underscored as affording an expanded sense of embodiment by which we navigate the material and affective constructs of social life, figuring and refiguring oneself in and amongst others. Listening is therefore always a question of relationality and is put to work against the pressures and possibilities found in attuning to the world around. As such, the project works in and around notions of acoustics, as what impinges or supports the work of listening, leading to issues of orientation and equilibrium, belonging and alienation, compassion and interruption.
By bringing together working groups of artists at selected sites and cities, experiences of listening and being heard are mobilized as a base for developing a new sense for socially engaged art, and how collaborations may be fostered across diverse communities, human and nonhuman bodies, material objects and energetic forces. Experimental approaches to artistic production, as well as curation and presentation, will be activated in order to highlight the working process as one of self-organization: how as groups of artists we may work through the project by enacting gestures of listening and hearing each other, and how this may intensify collective decision-making and performance. This includes a consideration of practices of commoning, mutual aid, piracy, and self-organized living, leading to reflections on what Stavros Stavrides terms “communities in movement”: a reworking of identitarian politics in support of connective territories and networks of solidarity. Social acoustics will be unpacked as a range of methods that attempt to modulate the distribution of the heard and the underheard, the resonant and the withdrawn, the apparent and the illegible as found in particular contexts and situations. As such, the project aims to generate creative approaches to collaborative and embodied practices, which may lead to poetic ecologies of relation.