[Tekst dostępny tylko w języku angielskim] “Listening means expanding the boundaries of the familiar, the recognized, and the known. [...] Listening is a power: it can open up and welcome, it can support and accompany, and it can offer a way out.”
Brandon LaBelle, The Listening Biennial, 2021
The Sound Studies Forum presents its first open call, “Beyond Borders. Listening to the Contemporary,” taking as its starting point the concept of debordering, which describes processes through which the material and symbolic divisions produced by political, social, and cultural conflicts are transformed, crossed, or made permeable. Developed within border studies, beginning with the work of Mathias Albert and Lothar Brock, debordering does not necessarily imply the disappearance of borders, but rather their continuous reconfiguration: while some are weakened, others are displaced, reinforced, or reconstructed.
Beyond Borders. Listening to the Contemporary extends this perspective to the fields of sound and listening, exploring how borders are produced, crossed, and transformed through sonic and listening practices. Sound is not neutral: it moves through bodies, occupies spaces, creates forms of belonging, preserves memories, and can both reinforce and challenge structures of power. Colonialism, wars, migration, ecological crises, urbanisation, surveillance, and technological transformations have produced—and continue to produce—specific acoustic boundaries: between languages and cultures, centre and margin, what can be heard and what is rendered inaudible, human and non-human, memory and future.
How do concepts such as occupation, belonging, separation, and the crossing of borders resonate within contemporary auditory cultures, from geopolitical and postcolonial dimensions to the everyday spaces of individual experience?
The call invites sound artists and sound practitioners to explore sound as a space for crossing and negotiation—not only as artistic material and expression, but also as a research method, a political device, and a form of knowledge. The proposed works and practices may investigate how listening can help transcend, make porous, or rethink borders, bringing bodies, territories, memories, communities, environments, and technologies into relation.
Beyond Borders. Listening to the Contemporary thus aims to stimulate reflection on the role of sound and listening as tools for critically inhabiting the present and for imagining and building new possibilities for coexistence on this planet.
Research Areas
Proposals exploring, without being limited to, the following areas of research are encouraged:
- sonic anthropology and listening practices;
- sonic ethnography and artistic research;
- sonic colonialism and the decolonisation of listening;
- acoustic ecologies and environmental crises;
- sonic heritage, oral memory, and archives;
- soundscapes and territorial transformations;
- migration, diaspora, and acoustic identities;
- sonic violence, propaganda, and war;
- extractivism, infrastructures, and the geopolitics of sound;
- artificial intelligence, algorithms, and digital colonialism;
- sonic justice and the right to listen;
- acoustic biodiversity and the extinction of soundscapes;
- multispecies relations and more-than-human listening;
- participatory and community-based practices;
- speculative sound futures.
Required Materials
- project description;
- audio files in MP3 and WAV formats;
- biographical note;
- portfolio.
