Nottingham Contemporary

Due to concerns around COVID-19, contributions to this event will appear in The Contemporary Journal.

The fourth instalment of the symposia series Sonic Continuum, our long-term research strand investigating social architectures of time and practices of world-making through sound, features artists, thinkers, musicians, and sound researchers to ask what are the limits of sound?

In the nineteenth century, developments in the cultural history of hearing in Europe and the emergence of acoustics as a scientific discipline, led to the articulation of new sensory relations and new theories of knowledge. An emphasis was placed on the ear canal as the medium through which humans apprehend the world. Since then, artists, feminists, queer/disability and critical race theorists have struggled against the distance between representation and experience, time and space, and sound and sense, implied by this way of listening to the world.

This two-day programme of performances, dance, talks, and poetry, tunes to the haptic and sensorial dynamics of listening across auditory registers and a wide spectrum of frequencies. It proposes modes of listening beyond the ear, that are attentive to the sound of political climates and non-human languages towards renewed kinships and a longer tempo of auditory awareness.

Participants include legal scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva, ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier, performance and visual artists Evan Ifekoya and Jota Mombaça, dancer and choreographer Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, media scholar Nelly Y. Pinkrah, anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli, sociologist Martin Savransky, artists Libita Sibungu and Jenna Sutela, sound artist and filmmaker Aura Satz, and more.