2019-10-02 - 06:00 PM / Knut Knaus Auditorium, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen,
Brandon LaBelle, Towards the work of Acoustic Justice
Dániel Péter Biró, Spinoza’s Ethics: Secular Religion Expressed in Historicized and Contemporary Sound
Lilia Mestre & participating students, Fragile Community Score
The experiences of hearing and being heard contribute greatly to negotiating the work of recognition and mutuality, supporting the building of community as well as the struggles by which communities unwork their identities and histories. From noisy and disruptive signals to vibrant ecologies of sharing and feeling, hearing and being heard may enable forms of reorientation, affinity, and solidarity across dominant and marginalized communities. As such, notions of acoustic and sonic imaginaries may be considered in order to think through listening as a pathway for engaging the temporalities and spatialities that bind us, as well as for the crafting of aesthetic techniques of musical and collective making.
The seminar brings together participating artists, composers, and researchers to reflect upon questions of sounding and hearing, and how understandings of embodiment and collaboration may be drawn out through engaging a range of movement strategies and sonic knowledges. This includes questions of musicality and (social) composition, choreographic practices and acoustic deterritorialization.
Dániel Péter Biró is Associate Professor/Førsteamanuensis at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. He studied in the U.S., Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Israel before receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004. From 2004 -2009 he was Assistant Professor and from 2009-2018 Associate Professor for Composition and Music Theory at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada. In 2011 he was Visiting Professor at Utrecht University and in 2014-2015 Research Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. In 2015 he was elected to the College of New Scholars, Scientists and Artists of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2017 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Dániel Péter Biró has been commissioned by prominent musicians, ensembles and festivals and his compositions are performed around the world.
Lilia Mestre is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels working mainly in collaboration with other artists. She’s interested in art practice as a medial tool between several domains of semiotical existence. Mestre works with assemblages, scores and inter-subjective set ups as an artist, curator, dramaturge and teacher. She was co-funder of Bains Connective Art Laboratory in Brussels (1997) acting as project dramaturge in 2006 and artistic coordinator between 2009 and 2016. Since 2008 she has been mentor, workshop facilitator and associated program curator at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Brussels where she has been researching scores as a pedagogical tool titled Scorescapes. Since 2017 Mestre is artistic coordinator and co-curator of a.pass.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. He is Professor at the The Art Academy, University of Bergen. He develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, often working collaboratively and in public. Works include “The Other Citizen”, Club Transmediale, Berlin (2019), “The Autonomous Odyssey” (with Octavio Camargo), Kunsthall 3,14 Bergen (2018), “The Ungovernable”, Documenta 14, Athens (2017), “The Hobo Subject”, Gallery Forum, Zagreb (2016), and “The Living School”, South London Gallery (2016). He is the author of Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010; 2019), and Background Noise (2006; 2015).