Spatial Listening

In collaboration with the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London, I co-curated a one-day event with Priscilla Lo and Susana López Orozco. The event was conducted in response to Pilvi Takala’s solo exhibition On Discomfort at Goldsmiths CCA and its playful negotiation of invisible social codes of conduct.

As a collective of curators, we invited artist Alex De Little to perform a listening event. This event was part of an ongoing project to create sonic relationships between individuals and their architectural environments.

De Little’s collective, multi-part experiment invites audiences to participate in sounding and listening as an alternative methodology of knowing, understanding and relating. As a perceptual tool, listening transforms the architectural environment from a visual landscape, rendering it as a dynamic time-space whose contours are perpetually modulated by sounds as received by listeners.

A participatory installation foregrounded these potent sonic modes throughout the day, capturing real-time speech and movements within the gallery space. An artist-led spatial listening workshop, building from breathwork and bodywork, enacted a series of engagements with the CCA's architectural spaces. The evening ended with a performance intervention by the artist, further introducing, recycling, and layering sound to activate the installation.

The performance was conducted in the Oak Foundation Gallery of the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, a redeveloped Grade II-listed Laurie Grove Baths water tank construction. Due to its unique architectural composition, the gallery offers extraordinary opportunities for sound performances.

Alex De Little is a sonic artist and researcher based in Leeds and London, UK. His practice encompasses installation, composition, performance and workshops; it is concerned with the interrogation of listening as a way to understand environment, self, and social relations. Alex’s work and collaborations have been featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Tate Modern, Somerset House, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Health Museum (Houston, TX), Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen), The National Science and Media Museum, London Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Walmer Yard, and the Hepworth Wakefield. Alex completed a practice-based PhD with Scott Mc Laughlin and Martin Iddon at the University of Leeds and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Leeds. He is a member of CAVE (Centre for Audio-Visual Experimentation) and an honorary research fellow at Goldsmiths Centre for Sound Practice Research.