Listening Space Kassel takes the form of a living document, as it chronicles the activities of the documenta 14 Listening Space program in Athens, as well as other crucial sonic parts of the Athens exhibition. In Athens, Listening Space is a program of events that explores sound outside of established hierarchies of music production and performance. In the project’s diverse concerts, lectures, and performances, forms of sonic expression take cues from architectural modifications, visual barriers, speaker configurations, natural-sound environments, listening instructions, and spatial choreographies. In this way, the program seeks sonic conditions that go beyond sound’s aural signification and instead illuminate how its physical, social, and political dimensions can be performed and heard.
In Kassel, not only are these performances documented and archived but their compilation forms an active record that expands over time as the sound-related activities in Athens continue to unfold during the course of the exhibition in both cities. If the Listening Space program in Athens aims to break with conventional musical settings, placing the listener at the center of these physical experiences, Listening Space Kassel, which inhabits the mezzanine of documenta Halle, with a view onto Friedrichsplatz, offers their revisitation from an inevitably removed yet equally personal perspective.
How do we read the intricate web of space, time, and locality that constitute a sonic live experience through the medium of recording and how do we navigate our listening of it? How might listening to and in Athens translate to listening in Kassel? And what do we hear when the source of sound remains unknown to our vision? While the sound performances in Athens create specific conditions and with them a certain kind of listening and collective space, the audio recording of these events asks the listener to trace this space while becoming aware of its e ect on their own body and mind. In Kassel, a direct interface makes available the crucial aspects of the sonic encounter for the listener to actively experience the mechanisms of sound and its perception. As Pauline Oliveros once wrote, “Listening to space changes space and changing space changes listening.”
Listening Space Kassel is curated by documenta 14 Sound and Music Advisor Paolo Thorsen-Nagel.
Quasim Ahmad, Sam Auinger, Giorgos Axiotis, Stratos Bichakis, Pina Bounce, Anthony Burr, Panos Charalambous, Chris Chondropoulos, Charles Curtis, Dessner brothers, Philipp Gropper, David Grubbs, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mette Henriette, IONE, Athina Katsanevaki, Liz Kosack, Christina Kubisch, Brandon LaBelle, Lala Rukh, Katalin Ladik, Alvin Lucier, Sébastien Marteau, Ed McKeon, Bruce Odland, Pauline Oliveros, Aki Onda, Dafne Vicente Sandoval, Dan Peter Sundland, Akio Suzuki, Efthimis Theodossis, Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Jan St. Werner, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Seth Parker Woods, Peter Zinovieff
