A performative conversation between Salomé Voegelin and Athena Athanasiou
Noisy Words invite writer, artist, Professor of Sound
Salomé Voegelin and writer, scholar and Professor
Athena Athanasiou in a performative conversation on engaged listening of, through and with noise as a socio-political practice.
In this session, Athena Athanasiou and Salomé Voegelin will perform and improvise a co-listening, co-sounding and co-reading that tries to conjure an auditory ethics and responsibility unbound from moral, cultural imperatives but performed in the contingent ephemerality of sound. Their exchange stages a continuous attempt at finding interpretations not as reconstructions but as novel materialisations that are soundings of the unknown to hear another side, another body, another ear, pluralizing the hegemonic fiction of reality.
In particular their unscored meeting will bring together Athanasiou’s ideas on ways in which
απόηχος [aftersound, aftermath], as consequence, impact, resonance and indefinite sound barely audible, can constructively push the boundaries of archives of violence and trouble normative ways of listening, with Voegelin’s notion of sonic possible and impossible worlds: the world’s invisible variants that are made accessible as in thinkable through sound, and whose challenge to a singular, homogeneous reality brings forth the politics of impossible worlds; those realities that find no politico-oscillatory coincidence with what we think we see but whose consequences make their audition essential.
What motivates this discussion is the tracing of sonic temporalities that capture injustice and the need to respond to such (unheard) narratives (i.e., narratives of gender and racist violence) -either those that are told or those that have not (yet) been told or heard. How do differently noisy bodies keep the present and future of audibility open? How do they perform the ethical and political positionality of listening and audibility?
These are questions we hope to que(e)ry from the possibility and impossibility of our own bodies that exist not separately but in a continuum with other human and more-than-human bodies, made from the same stuff, interdependent and vulnerable rather than in charge or organising. These are bodies that sing the aesthetic and political possibilities of the chorus; the chorus that is a possibility of attuning to grief and rage. Their voices produce resonance or its mute absence. Whereby resonance assumes a certain response and responsiveness that tests the significance, audibility and impact of differently noisy bodies. It is at once a design, a semantic and a socio-political phenomenon which performs the actuality, legitimacy and legibility of a political possibility, and determines how, and whose human and more-than-human bodies, we can hear and thus count.
There will be a
live-streaming of the event.
About Salomé Voegelin:
Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner engaged in listening as a socio-political practice. She works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet in the crises of planetary health, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric realities engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is concerned with Designing a Sonic Planet: taking the invisible and relational as a starting point to employ musical and sonic sensibilities to re-imagine the world from its indivisibility, avoiding taxonomies and a linear cartography by working with a fuzzy geography.
Voegelin writes articles and papers, books and texts and text-scores for performance and publication. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018). Her most recent book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (2023) 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. She is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
About Athena Athanasiou:
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece). She is the Director of the Laboratory of Anthropological Research and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Among her publications are the books: Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with Judith Butler, Polity Press, 2013); Crisis as a ‘State of Exception’ (Athens, 2012); Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007); Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‚the Greeks‘ (co-ed. with Elena Tzelepis, SUNY Press, 2010); Deconstructing the Empire: Theory and Politics of Postcolonial Studies (Athens, 2016); Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006); Biosocialities (Athens, 2011). She has been a fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, at Brown University, and at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, at Columbia University. She is a member of the editorial advisory board of several journals (Critical Times, Feminist Formations, Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and others).
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