Photos © Orhan Kolukisa
Exhibition
Listening to Listening
48 Hours Neukölln Festival / Art Space Lab
18.06.-20.06.2021
>top e.V.
Listening to Listening is a group exhibition, co-curated by Tuçe Erel and Samuel Perea-Díaz, which explores the impact of air, architecture, and sound on listening through site-specific interventions on the windows.
Is it possible to perceive the notion of listening to listening?
Air is a crucial environment for breathing and hearing. In 2020, how one understands and interprets the notion of air has shifted due to a novel respiratory illness, caused by an airborne transmitted coronavirus. Based on these traumatic global-scale experience, we decided to rethink air and its function in our sound-based artistic research, concerning the 48 Hours Neukölln Festival theme in 2021. Within this scope, Listening to listening brings together four artists (Jasmine Guffond, Yelta Köm, Samuel Perea-Díaz, Banu Çiçek Tülü) at Top Transdisciplinary Project Space. This sonic show explores the possibilities of exhibiting and curating aural arts to reflect different audiences and modes of listening. Listening is a practice of embodiment that can be heard as a vibrational mechanism in the air or triggered through our minds. To hear collectively, we share the aerial vibration, the sound of others, and the listening of ourselves.
The artists are invited to use contact microphones, speakers, and screens which will be directly attached on the surface of the building, using transducers installed directly in the architectural elements of the façade (window glass, ventilation grid, and door) as well as the visual and non-visual components of what can be hidden or shown through the window.
These four pieces negotiate the question of “act of listening,” dealing with sound, air, movement, air circulation, and ventilation without forgetting its emotional and mental impact as well as a collectivity of the process. The sonic and visual experience will be an intervention on the project space’s windows by resonating with or without sound.
The four sound and visual installations will be experienced from the outside of the project space, people who pass by will hear a piece both coming from the ground and window. Through this installation, we aim to create a collective experience of sound and listening in the open air that the space will be used as an audio device and its content will deal with the understanding of solidarity and togetherness during these troubled times. All these prepositions enact with the question of “listening to listening” that each artist’s intervention proposed on the topic of sounded air oscillating between improvisation, generative electronic sound, and field recordings.
*Listening to Listening is kindly supported by the 48 Hours Neukölln Festival and Top Transdisciplinary Project Space.