What happens when we make ourselves available to share our listening? How do we experiment, perform, produce, invent listenings? Which forces make up our listening and to what extent do we have control of that experience? What do we hear and what do we silence? How can we express to the other what we experiment (not exclusively) with our own bodies? What emerges from this effort of sharing? These are some of the questions raised by Microfonias: invention and sharing of listening.
Microfonias is a practical-theoretical project that combines research and artistic creation. Through relational actions, we experience and reflect on ethical, poetic and political questions implicated in listening. We have based our actions on unconventional methodologies, such as conducting recorded conversations, collecting audio testimonies, exchanging artistic correspondences, developing affective reports from listening, exploring alternative writing formats, among others. Our actions could be described as experimental practices destabilizing hegemonic forms of listening and discourse while pointing towards a feminist politics of listening.
When we began the Microfonias project in 2017, we connected more on the basis of resonances than by identification, as our artistic practices point to different techniques, media, resources and musical scenes. What we had in common was the desire to build an alternative environment for research and artistic creation where we could start from our own experiences. This environment was crafted throughout our meetings and was modulated by an ethic based on listening. Our micropolitical cooperation has celebrated difference and been the backbone sustaining the force of transindividual metamorphosis. In our project, we create new possibilities by putting in contact our biographies, artistic practices and individual investigation.
Microfonias is a project developed by artists and researchers Lílian Campesato and Valéria Bonafé.
Video produced in June, 2020 for “Audio Testimonies Symposium – CRiSAP”
Project partners
