Politics of Listening

Politics of listening
Performative Programme curated by Marta Keil and Grzegorz Reske for the Festival "North-East-South-West"
Hellerau and Kunsthaus Dresden

with Nahuel Cano, Iwona Nowacka and Janek Turkowski, Zorka Wollny, Wojtek Ziemilski

What is the shape of the sound coming from peripheries of our attention? The centre is usually well audible, as it situates itself at the core of listeners’ focus, no matter if they like it or not. It speaks loudly, often flattening the sound with its own, dominating tone. The landscape of what we hear results from the way we distribute our attention. And that is a political decision, obviously. But the conditions of that very decision is shaped by the context within which we learn to listen. The melody of the voice of our neighbour, the sound of the streets, the flow of the rivers, the way a friend shuts the door, the moment of the year when the birds and their morning conversations are back, the order of raising voices at the family dinner.

Listening can be a demanding task. It requires a genuine curiosity of what we do not know yet and what we might not be sure how to handle. Attuning to the rhythm of the one we listen to means giving them as much space as they need - and sometimes giving up our own. It is thus an exercise of redistributing our own resources: attention, time, patience, curiosity. What do we need to practice listening? How to acknowledge the registers that are situated beyond our listening capacity and how to learn to hear what remains inaudible? How much time do we need to attune to unknown voices? How do you accommodate uneasiness that they might bring?

We are both part of the Performing Arts Institute, the collective initiative based in Warsaw, Poland, the post-communist country that since 1989 has been doing its best to follow the West with all its might. At the moment our perspective is shaken a bit though, as the two of us have recently relocated to the Netherlands. Uprooted from the soil that was nourishing and shaping our practice, we are still learning how to root in a new context. We somehow need to learn to listen anew.

The North East South West project is a multilayered conversation of voices coming from the regions situated at the peripheries or semi-peripheries of the Western, centralised perspective. The performative program created for Hellerau gathers artists coming from Poland and Argentina and based in various European countries (Germany, the Netherlands and Poland). They problematise the power relations between the centre and the peripheries not only in geopolitical terms, but also on the level of social and more-than-human relations. Wojtek Ziemilski challenges the theatre discourse, structure and tools, asking who do they actually belong to; Zorka Wollny creates a powerful soundscape of feminist voices taking over the public spaces, Iwona Nowacka and Janek Turkowski listen carefully to the unheard histories, creating conditions for conversations that are unlikely to happen otherwise and Nahuel Cano invites us for a journey of learning how to listen to the voices of the river, to its past and future currents and to the human and other-than-human inhabitants of its territory.