home

Borders exist in everyone’s life. From borders dividing countries to our personal boundaries such as personal space. Borders have a crucial impact on how we view and treat others and ourselves.
Borders can be both violent and safe. Letting people ‘touch’ us is a very powerful act. Boundaries keep that act from happening. This touch can be a violent touch, but there is also violence in not touching, as we can see happening with Covid for instance.  Therefore we rely more on verbal communication and so language becomes very important. There is something intimate in a voice. There is something intimate in speech. A voice can be soothing and gentle. Listening to a story by your grandma is an intimate moment. Catching the intimacy. Capturing the way of speaking: such a personal thing.

Borders - speech - violence - intimacy. Together we are exploring the intersection between these topics. Focussing on storytelling and the spoken word as a form of intimacy and border transgressing. Sticking to this collective theme, we are exploring different subjects relating to our own personal interests. In this way we are focussing on recording what is intimate for us, in order to publish these intimacies.

General feeling of process: We have so far done a lot of things together, we're in constant exchange, and ended up with a well argued position towards our topic.

Agreed goal: Gain insights individually through splitting up and going our own way. We will record for ourselves, explore the discussed topic through interviews and other recordings.

Plan for midterm: That we will all have made recordings, came back together to analyse them and see how they fit together. Where are the intersections of these? Decide on how we want to continue. As a group or individually.

Messages are being shared through actions and speech, meaning is being transmitted every day.
Acts are not without meaning, speech is not without meaning. The meaning is there, but are you listening?
Listening is a conscious choice.

Violence is not just a direct attack, violence is also present in placing some entities in the space of “the outside”,
of “the stranger”, of “the other”. This is an everyday form of violence that blocks us from listening to others,
and in which we ourselves partake in as well.
To truly hear someone, to listen, to engage in conversation is a way to break the border between “ourselves” and “the other”. It is a way to abolish the space of “the other”. Because of that, making space for listening is a political act. Making space for listening, means making space for the “us” rather than “the other”.

Our topic is simultaneously our way of working. Listening is active. It is a method itself, which starts by giving
attention to that which is around you. This is the first step in developing understanding and transgressing
the borders between us.
For Yusser, that meant listening to the long stories her grandma tells about the (somewhat) good old days;
for Bodine it meant asking her friends about the struggles they’ve had with being bilingual; for Franziska this meant asking both her close friend and her mother for stories about overcoming something scary; while Clara took a different route and explored different ways of listening to our natural environment to be able to rebuild the lost connection of humans belonging to nature.

As you can tell, we have all chosen to engage with those who are close to us and that which we have a connection to.This is a purposeful choice, as by recording those close to us we practice being attentive to what is already there.
In these conversations, we aimed to create space for meaning to flow without inhibition. While the conversations started in the form of “interviews”, where the “interviewee” is central; they soon turned into very intimate moments in which, through active listening, a new way of relating to each other was fostered.

By using audio and video recordings, we are able to publish and archive these moments, showcasing the inherent value of the voice of the “othered”; which often goes unnoticed, is unappreciated, and unacknowledged. In order to challenge this, we aimed to create an online space in which one gets to listen
and relate to the already created intimate moments.

With this project we have engaged with the practice of listening, using it actively as a method in order to be attentive to the ways in which we perceive “others'' around us. Giving attention to who and what is already there. By sharing our work, we aim to show how listening is itself a practice that can and should be fostered.
To foster it we need to view listening as a way to combat the everyday violence of “not hearing the other”.

Bibliography

Hooks, Bell. “CHOOSING THE MARGIN AS A SPACE OF RADICAL OPENNESS.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36, 1989, pp. 15–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44111660. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

Dankert, Zoë. “Decolonial Listening An Interview with Rolando Vázquez.” Soapbox, vol. 1.1, 2019, soapboxjournal.com/1-1-practices-of-listening/. Accessed 30 Nov. 2020.

Mbembe, Achille, and Morton, Stephen, Senior Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures, University of Southampton, UK. “Foucault in an Age of Terror : Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society.” Necropolitics, London : Palgrave Macmillan UK : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 152–182.

Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence : An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso, 2020.

Glenn, Cheryl, and Krista Ratcliffe. “Introduction: Why Silence and Listening Are Important Rhetorical Arts .” Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts, Southern Illinois University Press, 2011, pp. 1–19.

Leopold, Aldo. A sand county Almanac: And sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. 1949

Bennett, Jane. “Vibrant Matter - a political ecology of things”. Duke University Press. London. 2010

Wohlleben, Peter. “The Secret Wisdom of Nature”. Greystone Books. 2019

Kohn, Eduardo. “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human”. University of California Press. 2013

Bardinzinski, Flip, Posthuman - Postnature? Transhumanism and Environmental Ethics. Dec 30, 2015

Roszak, Theodore. “The voice of the Earth”. A touchstone book. Published by Simon & Schuster. New York. 1993.

Lovelock, James E. “Gaia: A new Look at Life on Earth”. Oxford University Press, USA. 1982

Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge - Taylor and Francis Group, 2000.