Soft letting of language — Listening for emergent wor(l)ds

My presentation for Listen for Beginnings drew on a number of recent collaborations to explore how the ethico-aesthetic practice of listening (and being listened to) has increasingly become a vital thread within my enquiry. The performativity of my presentation involved weaving between different research artefacts and materials generated in and through artistic collaboration (including video and transcript extracts), alongside "thinking with" a wider critical-contextual milieu (specifically the writing of thinkers such as Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Lispeth Lipari) to consider the relational and ethical ramifications of a listening attitude. I explored how forms of languaging developed through listening might in turn call for different kinds of reception (alternative ways of listening and reading), alongside proposing how a ‘listening stance’ might inform an approach to collaboration — collaboration conceived as a mode of in-touch-ness that also allows for adjacency and alongside-ness, for indirectness and obliqueness, for the reciprocity of listening and being listened to. Within this published context, I want to allow a ‘breathing space’ (perhaps even a ‘listening space’) for selected fragments of an emergent vocabulary of/through listening generated from within a process of collaborative research. My paper comprises extracts of conversational transcript from three different collaborative projects where an immanent and reflexive language for attesting to the qualities and conditions of listening emerges in and through a language-based practice that is itself imbued with a listening attitude — one that involves listening to oneself, listening to others, listening for emergent wor(l)ds. The textual extracts have been generated largely through a practice of conversation and/or the experimental reading of conversational transcripts within the following projects: I – “Dorsal Practices” is an artistic research collaboration with Katrina Brown for exploring how a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world; II — “thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices” is an artistic research project involving Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel (with Sabine Zahn in the first phase) that focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices enable and realise a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking; III — “The Appearance of the More” is an artistic research collaboration with Nicole Wendel for bringing-into-relation the unfolding, embodied processes of drawing and languaging as resonating fields of perception and cooperation. keywords: listening, language-based artistic research, collaboration, conversation, dorsal practices