Co-listening:

This event presents the results of an SNSF-funded project “Critical Listening to the Global South: Towards a Decolonization of Sound Media” finishing at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, within the framework of a Practice-to-Science fellowship (2022–2025).

Critical Listening to the Global South was a project to systematically and comprehensively investigate the unique sound worlds of the Global South, to outline the historical and aesthetic developments of sound research in some of the key regions, namely South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. It examined the sonic aesthesis and thinking in these regions in the light of a complex and fraught colonial relationship with the West to bring forward the under-engaged and often underrepresented artists and thinkers and epistemologies. The research method was auto-ethnographic, informed by the researcher’s migratory backgrounds, and drew insights from long conversations with prominent sound practitioners based in the Global South or part of their diaspora. The research traced a decolonial milieu of sounding and listening and offers embodied perspectives on resonant relationality, reciprocity, and auditory confluence. These perspectives will unfold in a critical conversation with PhD scholar Stas Shärifullá.