OBS: UTSATT! Poetics of Listening: Book presentation with Brandon LaBelle, moderated by Manos Saklas
januar 30 @ 16:30 – 18:30
Please join us in celebrating the launch of Poetics of Listening: Inner Life, Social
Transformation, Planetary Practices with Brandon LaBelle. LaBelle will be discussing the book together with sound artist Manos Saklas. The event is free and open for everyone.
From self-determination to social participation, somatic healing to collective repair, political recognition to ecological engagement, listening is vitally influential in negotiating our most fundamental challenges. Poetics of Listening considers listening to be not only important to social struggles, but also a form of poetic imagination and communion. It moves listening toward a broader application and view, which includes the ability to listen across human and more-than-human worlds, to listen into or with one’s body, or to listen out for futures to come as well as addressing unfinished histories, and it challenges us to think more broadly about what it means to hear and be heard within today’s complex environments.
In addition to Poetics of Listening, Brandon LaBelle and Manos Saklas will discuss the work of The Listening Biennial, and the recent publication The Listening Biennial Reader, vol. 2: Infralistening, elaborating on creative practices of listening within the arts today.
Brandon LaBelle, Poetics of Listening: Inner Life, Social Transformation, Planetary Practices, Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2025.
The Listening Biennial Reader, vol. 2: Infralistening, edited by Rebecca Collins and Brandon LaBelle, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin 2025. Including contributions from Miguel Buenrostro, Wanda Canton, Rebecca Collins, Henry Ivry, Nanna Hauge Kristensen, Brandon LaBelle, Margarida Mendes, Sara Mikolai, Mhamad Safa, Luísa Santos, James Webb.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening
Biennial. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen
(2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Manos Saklas (b. 1998, Athens) is an artist working across contemporary art, radio and electro-acoustic music. His practice engages with cultural artifacts and compositional methodologies drawn from fields as diverse as conceptual art, electroacoustic music, greek mythology, acoustic ecology, and weather-sensing—underscoring their sociopolitical resonances. His work has been featured internationally in a wide range of settings, including galleries and museums, cultural institutions, concert halls and sound art festivals, film and fashion, radio and public spaces. His recent exhibitions include:
Kairos, Listening to the Weather (2026), Polyrhythmia in Paper (2026), Chronopoetics (2025), Articulations of Chaos (2024). Since 2020, he has been the artistic director, moderator and producer of the monthly radio show Otoliths in Flux as part of Onassis Cultural Center’s Stegi Radio program. He studied visual art at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo (KHiO) Kunstakademiet, Royal Institute of Art (Mejan), and Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) as well as sound studies and electro-acoustic music at Xenakis KSYME-CMRCand EMS Elektronmusikstudion.