October 7

🇦🇷 🇧🇷 GMT-3 1:40 to 5:00 pm | 🇪🇺 GMT+2/CET 6:40 to 10:00 pm

Opening Statement

Hildegard Westerkamp

Inside the Experience of Time

Environmental listening makes our place inside the soundscape conscious. One could say that it reveals viscerally and without a doubt our position as part of the environment, no matter how much humanity insists on positioning itself apart as a species from the rest of nature’s living beings. A lifetime of listening, recording and composing has been a lifetime of never-ending learning. Listening can potentially break the illusion of separateness, develop ever-evolving skills for sensing interconnectedness of all life on earth and what the implications for urgent changes in this climate crisis may be. With the help of sound recording and composition excerpts I will attempt to trace whether and how the theme of ecology can offer a bridge towards cultural action in music and sound.

Makis Solomos

Exploring the ecologies of music and sound: the living world, the mental and the social in today’s music, sound art and artivisms

This paper will present a forthcoming book that I’m just finishing. Here is the abstract of the book:

An ever-increasing number of musicians and sound artists, concerned about the world’s future, are addressing environmental issues. Others (or sometimes the same ones) tackle social or political questions, issues relating to gender, decolonial themes, and more. There has been a resulting increase in artistic practices that are situated, and committed to certain ideas, reconnecting with the idea of ‘engaged’ art, whether in terms of renewing sound materials and forms, or of making an active contribution to changing the world.

These developments have the potential to stimulate musicology, enriched by sound studies, to analyse interactions between art and its multiple environments. That is the object of this book, which explores the ecologies of music and sound, inspired by Félix Guattari, for whom environmental destruction caused by capitalism goes hand in hand with deteriorating ways of living and feeling, and for whom an ecosophical stance, combining various ecological registers, offers a glimpse of emancipation, a position strengthened today by intersectional approaches.

By exploring environmental, mental and social ecologies through the lens of the history of music and current artivisms (especially in the fields of acoustic ecology, contemporary music and sound art), this book sets out several theoretical and analytical debates: it develops a theory of sound milieus and questions the biopolitics of sound; it analyses the relationships between music and the living world and studies soundscape compositions, field recording, ecomusicology, and the creation of sound biotopes; it explores listening as a way of constructing the commons, processes of subjectivation and empowerment, and the use of sound and music to violent ends; it is about the social and political functions of music and the autonomy of art, sonic ecofeminism, degrowth in music, and more.

Discussion

Hildegard Westerkamp (Vancouver, Canada)

Makis Solomos (Paris8, France)

Stéphan Schaub (UNICAMP, Brasil) - Moderator

Fernando Iazzetta (USP, Brasil) - Designated debater

Alejandro Reyna (UNL, Argentina)

Andrea Cohen (Radio France, France/Argentina))

Andre Luiz Gonçalves de Oliveira (UNICAMP, Brasil)

Carlos Palombini (UFMG, Brasil)

Damián Rodrigués Kees (UNL, Argentina)

Denise Garcia (UNICAMP, Brasil)

Diego Makedonsky (UNTREF, Argentina)

Gonzalo Biffarella(Argentina)

Gustavo Basso (UNLP, Argentina)

Gustavo Celedón (UV, Chile)

Janete El Haouli (UEL, Brasil)

José Augusto Mannis (UNICAMP, Brasil)

Marisa Fonterrada (UNESP, Brasil)

Nicolas Donin (IRCAM, France)

Raúl Minsburg (UNTREF, Argentina)

Roberto Barbanti (Paris8, France)

Rodolfo Caesar (UFRJ, Brasil)