JU Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology invites you to attend a lecture by Prof. Salomé Voegelin, artist, writer and sound researcher from the London College of Communication, author of the book Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018).

Silence has a monstrous formlessness. It leaks out and takes in. The ‘itself’ and the ‘myself’ are not here, only their process, and that is ambiguous, incomplete and unreliably conjoined with everything else. 

This presentation starts with a contemplation of silence as unheard sound, as that which for physiological, political, ideological and aesthetic reasons we cannot or do not want to hear. This desire not to hear is discussed as a ‘strategic deafness’, as the will not to hear ecological, political, social, subjective and other realities. It brings into focus what political scientist Nikita Dhawan calls the privileged role of hearing: “Hegemonic norms of recognition determine what can be read, heard and understood as intelligible and legible” and thus what can make itself count and what by contrast remains silenced and or spoken for. Listening out for a recognizable language and bodies only, silences what speaks in another register. To resists such reductions a more ‘subtle audition’ is required that listens out for the non-linguistic and the non-recognisable to hear the silenced speak in her own voice: breaking the privileged status of language, its rational, referential sense as well as normative expectations. 

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet in the contemporary crises of climate and public health, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is engaged in the transversal and transdisciplinary potential of the sonic - to listen across disciplines and processes in order to develop a hybridisation of research where arts and humanities skills and methodologies can generate a contemporary response to climate, health and social emergencies.

She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018). These books, as well as her numerous articles and papers, applied working and experimentation, develop a critical understanding of art and the environment as aesthetic, ecological and social, as well as economic and political milieus, whose relational reality and artistic fiction is made accessible through a “sonic thinking”, understood not as essentialist or an anti-visual mode of engagement, but as multi-sensory and response-able, making us “see” more, and appreciative also of what we might not see. Her new book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands, appears with Bloomsbury in early 2023. It moves curation through the double negative of not not to ‘uncuration’: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.

The lecture will be delivered in English.