Just Listening: Towards an Oliverosian Feminism

Sun Oct 22, 2-5.30pm

Goldsmiths CCA

This afternoon workshop is grounded in feminist group activities of relational listening and deep listening. It draws on US-based composer, artist and educator Pauline Oliveros’s practice of meditative, non-hierarchical listening, or listening “to everything all the time.”  The workshop seeks to enhance sonic and relational awareness by combining somatic exercises with presentations and group reflection. 

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz leads exercises informed by her experience as a Deep Listening practitioner and certified tutor mentored by Pauline Oliveros since 2008, including her work developing INTIMAL - Interfaces for Relational Listening (2017-2019).  

Irene Revell introduces her research and curatorial practice informed by feminist performance scores and aural history portraiture. She discusses the deep ambivalence at the core of Oliveros’s work, where heightened focal attention and expanded global awareness aim to hold together potentially conflicting elements.

 Expressions of Interest

To reserve a place on the Waiting List, please send a brief Expression of Interest to feministduration@gmail. We are happy to receive Expressions via video or voice memo as well as email. We will let you know if you have received a place, and send you further information about the event.

Workshop Leaders

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound artist-researcher interested in listening and sounding our sonic migrations: the resonances left in between the borders we cross when we tune in and meet others across distant locations. She has created telematic sonic improvisations and interfaces for relational listening, to understand sensorially migratory experiences. She is a Deep Listening® certified tutor, with a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation. In Bath, with The Studio Recovery Fund 2021, she created the INTIMAL App© for people to explore their “migratory journeys,” senses of place and telepresence. Ximena composes hybrid listening rituals with musicians and non-trained musicians, and improvises with spoken word and voice. She has engaged in artistic collaborations including with the NowNet Arts Ensemble since 2020. She teaches Deep Listening® at the Center for Deep Listening, and independently, with an emphasis on Sonic Migrations.  Emerging from her INTIMAL project, Ximena leads a collective of Latin American migrant women listening to their migrations and expanding notions of femininity, territory and care.

Irene Revell is a curator and writer who works with artists across sound, text, performance and moving image. Much of her work since 2004 has been with the London-based curatorial agency Electra, and she has been closely involved with collections including Electra’s Her Noise Archive and Cinenova: feminist film and video, as a trustee and founder-member of the Cinenova Working Group. Recent projects include ‘They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it,’ year-long reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (2020), co-organised with Anna Barham; workshops ‘These Are Scores’ (Camden Arts Centre, 2019; Sounding Bodies, Danish Royal Academy of Fine Art, Copenhagen, 2018; CNEAI, Paris, 2017, amongst others); exhibition ‘ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE’ with Karen Di Franco (Chelsea Space, London, 2018). Since 2014 she has been curator/associate lecturer on the MA Sound Arts, London College of College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She completed her TECHNE AHRC-funded doctoral thesis, Live Materials: Womens Work, Pauline Oliveros & the feminist performance score at CRiSAP in 2022. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher on artist Aura Satz’ Preemptive Listening project at the Royal College of Art, London.

Residents at Goldsmiths CCA

‘Just Listening’ takes place as part of the Feminist Duration Reading Group’s 2023-2014 residency at Goldsmiths CCA, New Cross, London, SE14.

Image Credit: Berit Fischer, Collective Earth Meditation, Radical Empathy Lab: Affective Listening, at Errant Sound, Berlin, 2017. Photograph: Berit Fischer