Nottingham Contemporary

'On Listening'

Join us for a series of free monthly workshops exploring creative-critical practice, hybrid methodologies and experimental thinking.

Organised in collaboration with the Critical Poetics research group based at Nottingham Trent University, and featuring international guest speakers, the Five Bodies workshops provide a new platform for debate and collaboration for those interested in exploring the relationship between creative and critical writing.

Led by poet Nisha Ramayya, this creative-critical workshop hopes to experiment with learning through listening, to experience through obscurity, and to find sense through sound. Recognising our different circumstances and gathering remotely, discussions include the notion of the listening-walk, approached speculatively through dreams, patterns, and soundscapes. This is an opportunity to reflect on different bodies, environments, and relations as well as listening collectively to Alice Coltrane, Ellen Fullman’s The Long String Instrument, and a deep-sea cabled observatory in Monterey Bay. Readings include Jackie Wang’s ‘Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect’ (2017), Patrick Farmer’s 'Azimuth, the Ecology of an Ear' (2019), and Nathaniel Mackey’s ‘Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol’ (1987). Listening across these sources, this workshop asks: what are the material conditions and social textures of the ‘Sonic Continuum', and how might they be rendered in poetry? How do we think through sounds and listen through writing?

Our open call for the 2020-21 academic years is now closed. Join our Five Bodies monthly poetry series, where unexpected ideas, experimental drifts and multiple voices explore perceiving, sensing, feeling and knowing as knowledge-making practices.