Is listening a performance?

«Think about a song you loved as a teenager. Try and remember. How it loved you back.» You can read Ronja Svaneborg’s score-based work Do I need to move my lips to be part of the choir? like a poem. Or you can perform it. With me, with yourself, with those people over there, or with a collective body stretching across time, distance, and environments. How would the voices interact, attune, resonate? And is my listening itself the performance?
Come, listen, find out.

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Do-I-need-to-move-my-lips-to-be-part-of-the-choir-SCORE.pdf

Collective Ear is a collaboration between Brand-New-Life Magazine and Zurich University of the Arts.

Sound piece: Do I need to move my lips to be part of the choir?, 2024, by Ronja Svaneborg. Performed together with the audience at The Poly Listening Club on April 18, 2024, at Zurich University of the Arts.
Texts: Ronja Svaneborg and Barbara Preisig
Sound design and edit: Pascal Lund-Jensen
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Emma Murray, Maria Rebecca Sautter

Special thanks to:
The speakers, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, Kris Deker, Felix Friedrich, and the participating audience

Barbara Preisig

Barbara Preisig is an art historian and art critic whose research focuses on contemporary artistic practices and their social and political contexts. In exploring translocal, transdisciplinary, and nonacademic ways of writing and thinking, she addresses a range of subjects including artistic research, feminism, institutional studies, and the politics of authorship. Barbara Preisig is co-editor of Brand-New-Life.

Ronja Svaneborg

Ronja Svaneborg is a multi-disciplinary artist. Through her practice, she speculates on the voice as a bridge between self and other, blurring the distinction between individuals and their surroundings. With a focus on loneliness, polyphonic voicing and the response-ability of the collective ear, she researches attunement and resonance in interrelated listening and voicing experiences: modes of merging with the surrounding environment and participating in an orchestrated feeling of belonging.