Seminar: Let’s Talk Listening

Michiel Huijsman contributed to Let’s Talk Listening, the 20th anniversary seminar of Imagine IC

The seminar Let’s Talk Listening was about the performance of listening in democratic processes. During a full-day programme, this subject was approached from different angles within, but importantly also outside the heritage sphere.

For 20 years Imagine IC has been working towards ‘heritage democracy’. Since objects and collections of heritage tell our joint story, everybody should have a say in them. The continuous negotiation process of heritage-making thus involves diverse, even contrasting voices. Michiel took the concept of voices literally and presented a listening practice to connect with voices of both human and non-human beings all around us.

Listening to urban ambiances

As the sonic world is a constitutive part of being together, the question ‘How to create places where we can live together?’ can be reframed in ‘How should these places sound?’. To answer this question we should first study our listening. How do we listen to each other, to the world or to a specific social situation? In his workshop Listening to urban ambiances Michiel introduced a few shared listening practices recently developed by Soundtrackcity to assess and ultimately create new urban public places as a commons.

Photo c Marjelle van Hoorn