SOUND MATTERS –Session 1 – What are we not hearing?
In the framework of the exhibition « état bruit »
As part of the exhibition état bruit, the Konschthal Esch presents Sound Matters, a series of Sunday afternoon gatherings dedicated to the significance of sound and listening. Each session combines a public conversation with invited guests and a shared listening experience.
Together, we reflect on what we hear, what we ignore, and how listening shapes the way we perceive space, society, and one another. Through focused conversations and collective listening moments, the series explores how sound surrounds us, influences us, and at times overwhelms us - revealing that sound is not merely background, but a powerful force in how we experience and understand the world.
Session 1 – What are we not hearing?
During this session, titled “What are we not hearing?”, we will explore forms of listening that move beyond our usual physiological, social, and political frequency range, asking what escapes our attention even though it shapes how we experience the world around us.
The aim is to move listening away from the familiar, the expected, and the recognisable, and instead pay attention to sounds we often overlook or do not know how to hear. This inaudible is not silence, and it is not simply noise. Rather, it points to the unnoticed layers of our environments and bodies that influence how we perceive reality, even when we are not fully aware of them. Through reflection and collective listening, the talks invite audiences to explore what becomes audible when we shift our attention: listening at the edges of perception, beyond the human, and opening space for other ways of sensing and understanding the world.
Biographies
Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening and sound making 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 to generate undisciplined knowledge possibilities. Concerned with Designing a Sonic Planet she takes the invisible and relational as a starting point to employ musical and sonic sensibilities to re-imagine the world from its indivisibility. And she writes articles and papers, books, texts and text-scores for performance and publication. Her most recent books Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands Bloomsbury (2023) and Unperforming the Dream House ActiveRat (2023) engage in undoing as a productive untethering of knowledge and values from the expectations of historical references and a canonical frame to think and work them otherwise. She is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Pablo Diserens (b. 1994, they/iel) is a field recordist, artist, and the co-founder and curator of the publishing house forms of minutiae. Pablo is devoted to listening practices, non-human realities, and possible forms of interspecies coexistence. Rooted in ecological engagement and site-specificity, their work emphasizes listening as a political practice that centers presence and permeation for a radical planetary interrelation. Taking inspiration from the permeable skin of amphibians, Pablo approaches listening as a mode of becoming porous – a state in which the boundaries between self and world dissolve into a continuous, percolating exchange. In practice, Diserens plays with a wide array of microphones to listen to the minute, often little-known and inaudible, sounds of animals, geologies, and technologies. These are woven into ecoacoustic compositions to highlight the sonorous qualities of various environments. Sounds occasionally merge with visual and textual elements, unfolding within spatial installations and experimental filmmaking. In solidarity with a wounded planet, Diserens operates within hydrofeminist, posthumanist, and polymorphic ways of inhabiting and shapeshifting among non-human bodies. Their work invites listeners to attune to the present and rethink their relationship with the world and its biotic communities.
Duration: 1h30
Language: EN (translated into FR)
Age: open to all
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Free | No booking required.
More information on www.konschthal.lu.
