In what ways might the performative enactments found in musical improvisation support a greater sense for social possibility? Can sonic materiality lend to figuring dimensions of mutuality and the worlding of radical commons?
Matters of listening was held as a workshop at the Museum of Solidarity, Santiago de Chile, July 3, 2019. Bringing together musicians, artists, curators and researchers, the workshop addressed questions of collaboration and community, and the ways in which gestures of sound and listening contribute to ways of joining together. This included querying collaboration and community as being grounded in compassion, togetherness, intimacy as well as interruption, hesitation, restlessness. The workshop included discussion and theoretical reflection, and the construction of objects and spatial elements from found materials to be performed together. Performativity enabled an activation of what it means to gather, to speak and to listen together, from sharing voice to sharing skills, from language to the materiality of things. The workshop concluded with a public opening where visitors were invited to join in a process of collective improvisation.
Notes:
Collectivity: practices of
Collaboration: creative / critical togetherness
Community: questions of
1. notion of “composition” / togetherness (D. Papadopoulos): practices of composition; ontologically organizing: the making of worlds; improvisation; assemblage (commonability: matter)
2. JL Nancy: the inoperative community; ecstasy; unwork; sharing of singularities; state of passion; rather than a project (death): community (plurality) over communion (figurehead)
3. question of “identity”: S. Stavrides: “communities in movement”; thresholds; leaks; passages: linkages rather than fortifications or enclaves (from enclaves of identity to conduits of cooperation)
4. notion of “self-building”: the crafting of form / shared knowledge / skills; a making together; joyfulness: doing-with-matter / listening through the hand
5. self-built families (community construct): M. Zechner; “fictive kinships”; solidarities
6. “matters of listening”: explore together / construct a scene of “commonability”