Post-Traumatic Listening

Brief Critical and Spiritual Respite

Saturday, 23 January 2021 - 12pm
Place
Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
Capacity
50 people
Duration

From 12pm to 9pm

Curated by
Pan-Pan Kolektiva
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Pan-Pan Kolektiva, encounter in Cadalso de los Vidrios, 2020
Pan-Pan Kolektiva, encounter in Cadalso de los Vidrios, 2020

Pan-Pan Kolektiva was formed in March 2020 as a listening-centred research group, with PAN PAN a standard urgency signal standing for Pay Attention Now, but not as urgent as MAYDAY. After the global health and social emergency caused by COVID-19 society is not necessarily at an endpoint, yet it does require our attention. The crisis has been compounded by uncertainty stemming from already unstable employment and personal situations and we have witnessed the rise of individualism, solitude and isolation, which could lead to psychological imbalances.   

Over these months, Pan-Pan Kolektiva has focused its interests on analysing, through listening, the effects of these crises, observing how the social fragmentation mentioned above has triggered the simultaneous and oddly related rise of totalitarian ideologies with the ascent of New Age or anti-mask movements that harbour conspiracy theories — generally speaking, what has been termed “conspiritualism”.  

Pan-Pan Kolektiva sets out from the hypothesis that the current situation is giving rise to collective trauma and from the following question: Do we have the necessary tools to listen to each other or do we need to create new ones?

Pan-Pan Kolektiva takes this question to form the basis of its work around the concept of “post-traumatic listening”, a mode of listening that is yet to be defined or settled upon, and that relegates our position as an individual subject to collectivise malaise and experiences of mourning. Therefore, the collective has contacted a series of artists, thinkers and cultural agents and asked them to produce a series of tools they will present publicly at this event.

Moreover, the encounter features different listening exercises conducted by Víctor Aguado Machuca, Elisa Arteta, José Begega, José Luis Espejo, the Grupal Crew Collective (GCC), Susana Jiménez Carmona, Mattin, Violeta Mayoral, Agnès Pe, Miguel Prado and Arnau Sala.

Participants

Víctor Aguado Machuca is an artist, architect, musician and curator. He is president of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Spain (AMEE) and a researcher in Philosophy and Language Sciences at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has curated exhibitions in institutions such as the Ibero-American Institute of Finland (Madrid), Medialab-Prado (Madrid), the Cervantes Institute in Berlin and New York, The Graduate Center, CUNY (New York) and Oolite Arts (Miami).  

Elisa Arteta is a dancer and choreographer with an MA in Contemporary Technological and Performance Art from University of the Basque Country and an MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture from University of Castilla-La Mancha and Museo Reina Sofía. She combines her art projects in the field of choreography with her management work through co-directing Centro Huarte. Her work, performed in myriad art spaces in Spain and internationally, explores proprioception and the relationship between mind and body.

Jose Begega is a visual artist with a degree in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and an MA in Artistic Production and Research from the University of Barcelona, and a porn actor and sex worker. Through his own body, life experience and environment he investigates the spectator as an active subject in the artistic process, pornography, the construction of identities and fictions, the internet, interviews and audiovisual mediums to question the notion of reality.

José Luis Espejo is a teacher, researcher and exhibition and concert curator. After studying Art History, he bases his research on the relationships between the art and culture of listening, participating in self-managed projects such as Mediateletipos, Ursonate Fanzine and the Listening Observatory. He is an advisor on the live arts (music-sound) programme in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department and is a contributor to and founding member of RRS, the Museo’s online radio station. Moreover, he coordinates the module on Theory and History on the MA in the Music Industry and Sound Studies at Carlos III University in Madrid.

Grupal Crew Collective (GCC) is an open, mutating and interdisciplinary platform of diverse origins based in Madrid. Its efforts are concentrated into investigating the potential of music and partying as instruments of cultural agitation and social aggregation. GCC draws inspiration from collective creation that is inherent in ludic-music practices of all kinds from communities and sub-cultures, vindicating their habitually disparaged value in the spheres of Art, Culture and Politics (the capitals are not free).     

Susana Jiménez Carmona holds a PhD in Humanities and Culture from the University of Girona and is a graduate from the Guitar degree course at the Professional Music Conservatory of Córdoba. She is a lecturer on the MA in Sound Art at the University of Barcelona. Her work flows between music, sound art and philosophy, encompassing research, teaching and artistic practice, particularly its collaborative side. She has collaborated with different stage art companies, artists and collectives, giving an array of lectures and talks and publishing pieces in different international magazines on music and sound art. 

Mattin is a sound artist and theorist. His work focuses on the conceptual investigation of noise and improvisation, exploring strands that include the role of listening in relation to the immeasurable accumulation of digital information and at a time of mounting polarisation and social fragmentation; or the potential non-verbal communication can activate between bodies participating in a reflexive encounter. Moreover, he has co-edited, with Anthony Iles, Ruido y capitalismo (Noise and Capitalism, 2011) and participated in documenta14 (2017) with the “durational” concert Disonancia social (Social Dissonance).

Violeta Mayoral is a multidisciplinary artist and experimental dramaturgist who holds a degree in Communication and Cultural Industries from the University of Barcelona, with a specialisation in Semiotics and Image Theory from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She carries out her work with the unswerving conviction that everything can be signified, exploring, from the mise en scène of the everyday, hermeneutic questions that always flow out into a reflection around the existence of the individual and their semiotic condition.

Agnès Pe is a music researcher and sound producer with an interest in pedagogy. Her sound productions transcend limitations of music genre, navigating the detritus generated through MIDI archives and fictionalised narratives. She currently coordinates the radio programme Mitt Paté (Radio On Berlin), exploring the plunderphonics generated and distributed inside the internet framework.  

Miguel Prado is an artist and researcher in the Philosophy Department at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has written extensively about the theory of information and cybernetics in relation to the notion of noise and produces variegated music and audio pieces, working with different sound artists and theorists such as Mattin, with whom he recently produced the podcast Social Discipline. He is currently part of the band Harrga with Dali de Saint Paul.

Arnau Sala Sáez is a musician and visual artist. His different-format works feed into one another, with sound translating into visual structures whose form is condensed into sound compositions. By way of this habitat, Arnau builds a system with elements related to one sole consciousness. Under the name Ex Continent the artist presents installations in which sound, light and image coexist formally and conceptually.