2025 The Listening Biennial: Third Listening

“So many stars are twinkling above me that I can hear them. I listen to their hum, countless voices whispering in my ear. I can imagine what they’re saying to me. I’m carrying the whole universe on my shoulders. We all do, all of us.” – Nona Fernández, Voyager

The third edition of The Listening Biennial invites us to tune into the humming stars above and the countless voices they carry. These are voices of love and loss, voices that hold the past while evoking a future, and that resound with mystery and force, threading cosmic matter and embodied life with their potent stories. While our terrestrial, material existence demands increasingly committed forms of engagement, the cosmic voices above may continue to offer guidance in becoming-relatives. To look up is to listen out for a plurality of life-forms as well as pathways of connection found between here and there. The Listening Biennial aims at fostering a time and space in which such interstitial listenings may flourish.

Presented across a constellation of partner institutions and spaces located in different regions of the world, and in collaboration with associated collectives and creative initiatives, The Listening Biennial takes shape through the concept of Third Listening, emphasizing the intersubjective and interdependent. Third Listening is imagined as a form of interstitial listening intent on sensing and staying with the differential urgencies spanning cultural and material worlds. Third Listening is a listening done together and in spite of exclusionary systems, lending to acts of speaking-with and the embodied, living ethics that support diverse abilities. This includes holding the tension inherent to hospitality, where coexistence requires the ongoingness of struggle, imagination, courage and protection.

Third Listening as a framework has been developed through workshops, conversations and collaborative testings over the past year, involving many contributors and interlocutors in different places and contexts. These have been vital situations for reflecting upon the concept as well as opening onto ways of enacting a third listening dynamic. From contending with current polarizations to honoring the shared vitality of planetary life, such interstitial listening follows the pulse of a thick relationality defining contemporary experience. These are rhythmic, entangled and messy states of being mobilized to foster reparative action and the maintenance of material partnerships. Carrying the Third invites ways of committing to each other.

Following the concept of Third Listening, The Listening Biennial features artists, musicians, researchers and activists whose works give expression to the intersubjective and interdependent, animating the specters and stories of planetary coexistence. These are elaborated through a multi-faceted program of exhibition presentations, listening situations, intimate gatherings, discursive and performance events, and explorative workshops taking place across 25 locations over two months. This includes a program of online conversations aimed at bridging locations and languages as well as the publication of a series of audio papers by invited contributors.

Since 2021, The Listening Biennial has sought to foster research and discussion on listening, recognizing its transformative power as key to enriching personal lives and social initiatives, and which supports ethical, political practices. The third edition of The Listening Biennial is offered as a listening journey, inviting intimacy and the critical joy of collective worldings.