Situated Sonic Climate Fiction - Sound Ecology and Postnatural Listening

Applied Ecological Listening #2

Part of a workshop and lecture series in three iterations with Daniela Medina Poch, Yuri Tuma and Tim Rudbøg, respectively, facilitated by Bureau for Listening.

Do you dream in sound? When we imagine a noise or read about it, do we truly hear it? Expanding the ways we listen begins with asking what sound truly is. Is it just the friction of matter vibrating at frequencies our ears and body can detect, or can it also be the resonance of memory, emotions and anticipation within us? In Situated Sonic Climate Fictions, we will explore how imagined sounds come alive through both storytelling and shared listening. Sonic narratives can attune us to our private resonances, cultural soundscapes, and acoustic experiences. Set in Amager Fælled – with its layered military history, endangered wildlife, and human-crafted boundaries – this workshop will inspire us to imagine potential relationships within its environment. Does a frog's croak ring the same in my mind as in yours? Through collective imagination exercises, we will kindle the creative spark for potential future sonic climate fictions for the park that gathers us.

Applied Ecological Listening is a three-part series of outdoor workshops and lectures that invites artists, researchers, and members of the public to explore listening as an embodied and situated ecological practice. Hosted at Amager Fælled – a now protected natural area shaped by a layered history of military use, landfilling, and ongoing care and struggle – the programme unfolds within a landscape that embodies the call to explore listening in search of a reorientation toward ecological transformation, resistance, and resilience.

The programme asks: how might we listen differently in a time of climate crisis and ecological transformation? What kind of applied ecological listening does our time require? How can we cultivate a mode of attention attuned not only to what is voiced and sounding, but also to what is silenced, omitted, or unheard? Applied Ecological Listening is an invitation to shift the dominant logics of perception – away from extractive seeing, knowing, and naming – toward a practice of being-with, sensing-with, and listening-with the entangled worlds we inhabit.

Through a series of field-based and experimental lectures, workshops, and collective reflections, the series approaches listening not only as a sensory mode, but as a critical method for attuning to the complex entanglements of ecological life – practicing listening as a way of noticing relations across species, histories, and material traces; of sensing what is present, what is not known, and what is yet to be heard.

Over the course of the series, Bureau for Listening will facilitate the gathering and production of various outputs and forms of documentation, in collaboration with the invited ‘speakers’ and participants – for example, an Applied Ecological Listening Manifesto, listening prompts, and poetic fragments – which will be published at the end of the series.

Bureau for Listening

Bureau for Listening is an artist- and research-led platform investigating listening as a critical, empathic and artistic practice. Operating nomadically and transdisciplinarily, the Bureau works across sound, philosophy, and performance.

Its projects explore how listening can unsettle dominant knowledge systems and open spaces for collective inquiry, care, and attentiveness. Through experimental methods and collaborative formats, the Bureau approaches listening not merely as a sensory act, but as a situated and transformative mode of relation.

Bureau for Listening initiates and curates workshops, public programs, research gatherings, and publishing projects, often in collaboration with institutions and informal networks. It is a partner in organising the Copenhagen manifestation of The Listening Biennial.

The Listening Biennial

The Listening Biennial is an international artistic and research initiative that highlights listening as a relational capacity – a philosophical, political, creative, and research-driven practice.

The Biennial operates as a decentralised global platform, commissioning audio works, performances, and discursive programs across cities. Embracing radical empathy, ecological attunement, sonic storytelling, and interspecies dialogues, it asks: how can listening dismantle exclusion, human exceptionalism, and entrenched power structures?

Since its launch in 2021, The Listening Biennial has grown through local “manifestations” with partner venues and institutions. It also runs the Listening Academy, a series of workshops and seminars on listening as creative practice, in cities like Berlin, Delhi, Hong Kong, and Skopje.

Under a network of artists, curators, scholars, and collectives, the Biennial fosters an ecology of attention, encouraging participatory, attuned, and diverse listening cultures worldwide.