How can we listen in a non-extractive way?

We join a small gathering of friends on a balcony: Fran to your left, Sid and Moon to your right. It’s an early summer evening; the air is filled with birdsong and the sound piece Fuengu (2021) by Hong-Kai Wang. For this project, the artist explored the musical heritage of the family of Tsou Taiwanese composer Uong e Yatauyungana, using listening as a way to get to know the Psoseongana landscape. How can we listen in a non-extractive way? Can I hear without interest? Listen without taking anything away? And is there a way of hearing that is better – or worse? Who decides?

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bnl EP 4

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

Episode III is fictional writing inspired by the conversations that took place on June 4, 2024, during and after The Poly Listening Club at Zurich University of the Arts. Any resemblance to actual persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.

Sound piece: Fuengu, 2021, by Hong-Kai Wang. Originally performed at the Colomboscope Interdisciplinary Arts Festival in Sri Lanka: https://www.colomboscope.lk/athousandchannels-episode-five.

References mentioned in the episode:
Minato Chihiro, Landscape Theory: The Changing Memory of the Earth and Japan, Chuo Koronsha, 2018.

Amer Kanngieser, “listening as taking leave,” in: Seedbox Environmental Humanities Lab, 15 January 2021, https://theseedbox.mistraprograms.org/blog/listening-as-taking-leave/

Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Texts: Barbara Preisig
Sound design and edit: Pascal Lund-Jensen
Proofreading: Bram Opstelten
Speakers: Emma Murray, Jarina Müller Frischkopf, Alexander Prince Osei, Maria Rebecca Sautter
Special thanks to: Hong-Kai Wang, Aio Frei, Cannach MacBride, the speakers, Marcel Bleuler, Minda Deol, Laura von Niederhäusern, Kris Decker, 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.