This interdependency between speaking and listening in the configuration of political agency is ironically illustrated in Videograms of a Revolution<\/em>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - https:\/\/youtu.be\/zrQaPPETpR4.<\/span> (1992) by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujic\u0103. The early passages of the film capture the crucial moment in Nicolae Ceau\u015fescu\u2019s final presidential speech, in December 1989, during which he goes from being a subject with phone semantike<\/em> to a babbling a-semantic entity. We hear the crowd beginning to stir; the turbulence distracts Ceau\u015fescu and his face becomes visibly confused and alarmed. As the crowd be\u00adcomes increasingly audible we understand, as does Ceau\u015fescu, that people are no longer listening. At that moment, his microphone fails and all he can conjure is a repetitive calling out: \u201cHello! Hello! Hello!\u201d Through these utterances that have no reception, power passes from the speaker to the non-listeners, who then proceed to act, occupying the space and the technological means of political representation: the state TV station.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this historical example, the power dynamic between speaking and listening is not transformed, only appropriated. The problem is that the same power dynamic\u200a\u2014\u200abetween speaking and listening\u200a\u2014\u200acontinues to form the ideological basis for the political attitudes and social behaviours of subjects living in present democratic systems. The farce of televised political debates is one example of how, in Les Back\u2019s view, \u201cOur culture is one that speaks rather than listens.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Les Back, The Art of Listening<\/em> (New York: Berg, 2007), 7.<\/span> Our non-listening politicians serve as sad models of the total absence of the dialogical ethic; there is a compulsion to assert a stance rather than open oneself up to the possibility of being interrupted, disoriented, or confronted by something new in what the other has to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By contrast, in recent art practices there is a distinct turn toward social, political, and creative sides of listening. In 2011, when protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in New York and were prohibited from using amplified sound, the strategy of the \u201chuman microphone\u201d was adopted: out of necessity, everyone took to repeating what a speaker said. The technique quickly spread to protests across the country, even in cities where microphones were not prohibited. The experience was described by one New York protestor in this way: \u201c[The] people\u2019s mic forces people to be participatory, to listen, to understand that we\u2019re in it together.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Carrie Khan, \u201cBattle Cry: Occupy\u2019s Messaging Tactics Catch On,\u201d All Things Considered<\/em>, NPR, December 6, 2011, The Poetry Collective, a group of poets \u00adformed during Occupy New York in Zuccotti Park, experimented with democratic models, notably the Greek assembly. For their performances, all participants, ranging from unpublished writers to established and laureate poets, put their names in a lottery and were chosen at random. Each selected poet then read before the assembly for three minutes. Most importantly, lines of poetry were repeated back to the poet in the same call-and-response method used regularly at the park. As one attendee described, \u201cWith every line, a somatic gesture co-authorized the speaker and even confronted the poet with his or her own words. All of this meant there was little separation between the performer and the audience\u200a\u2014\u200athe work of art, at least, depended equally on the actions of both.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Travis Holloway, \u201cPerforming Art or Democracy? On Poetry at Occupy Wall Street,\u201d Guernica: A Magazine of Global Art and Politics<\/em>, December 6, 2011, <bit.ly\/2yt8Ewh>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Emphasizing speech at the expense of listening, appropriating listening within a given power structure, or instrumentalizing listening to support a power structure negates core values and characteristics of a democracy. Likewise, listening to form and not content, or not listening and the feeling of not being heard that this generates, produce distrust in any relationship. What, then, can constitute new modes of listen\u00ading that promote democratic exchanges? If contemporary society fosters disconnective modes of relating between governing bodies and their constituents and among social-political subjects, then the point at which we as individuals either perpetuate or transform these new attentive modes is where the potential first steps toward the reinvention of the democratic dialogic practice can take hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I would like to propose is a democratic attitude behind certain listening practices. By \u201cdemocratic attitude\u201d I am referring to how participation as a political subject can begin not with speaking, but with listening. It entails a deliberate letting go of a self-affirming stance and opening up and becoming attentive to the voices of others\u200a\u2014\u200ato their difference in political opinions, interests, and beliefs. This attitude promotes a democratic relationship with the other, insofar as active listening between interlocutors retains the possibility of accounting for difference, creating a dialogic relationship based in mutual trust and respect.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The work of Australian artist Alex Martinis Roe serves as an interesting case in point for how this democratic attitude can operate in practice. Roe\u2019s work maps feminist genealogies to explore how their histories and methods can resonate in contemporary contexts. She has performed extensive research into, and engaged directly with, numerous international feminist communities. She is preoccupied with the issue of representation: how to bring the voices of others into her artistic authorship while recognizing and accounting for their differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roe\u2019s piece To Become Two <\/em>(2014\u200a\u2013\u200a17) consists of a research project on the Milan Women\u2019s Bookstore Collective (1975\u2013). The work comprises various components, including workshops, performances, an artist\u2019s book, and a travelling exhibition including six films presented within an architectural installation. Central to the work is how Roe investigates and mobilizes what the Milan Women\u2019s Bookstore Collective call affidamento, <\/em>or \u201centrustment.\u201d Affidamento<\/em> is a form of doing that sets up the potential for a specific mode of relating between two people. It is a politics of relation that develops between two women starting with their differences in age, competencies, access to different political spaces, and so on.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Alex Martinis Roe, \u201c\u2018To Become Two\u2019 In the practice of affidamento<\/em> the emphasis is on dialogue in which listening is key. Sociologist Erich Fromm describes concentrated listening as a form of attention that you give to another.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving<\/em>, trans. Marion Hausner Pauck (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006).<\/span> With entrustment, listening clearly becomes a kind of gift insofar as what is given is the sense of being heard\u200a\u2014\u200athe individual\u2019s self-narrating is acknowledged and leads to the possibility of participating in and creating a social-political space with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crucial in Roe\u2019s art production is how she experiments with integrating into her work the methods of the various groups she works with. She believes that their practices, and the incipient relations that these groups produce have the potential to migrate into new contexts such as art, so that there, too, social behaviours and political relations will be inscribed differently. In this line of thought, she attempts to make the voices of the women \u201cwho were and always become part of it\u201d resonate.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Alex Martinis Roe, \u201cThe Voices within My Own,\u201d lecture delivered at Studium Generale Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, March 21, 2014, <bit.ly\/2BnzbAB>.<\/span> These voices include the various women she engages with during her research and the visitors whom she strives to interpolate as interlocutors through various forms of audio-visual storytelling, interviews, and participatory workshops. Her conscious goal is to problematize the normative model of solo authorship and its performative role in the construction of capitalist individualism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her work, Roe proposes an option in which signifying voices are transformed into interlocutors and agents of democracy. A platform of coexistence emerges through a form of reciprocal listening and an attentive attitude toward individual desires, commitments, and differences. With this model, the gift of listen\u00ading is a precondition for the existence of that political space. If, as individuals, we become apprentices of listening rather than masters of discourse we can perhaps promote a different sort of coexistence among humans, to borrow the term of psychoanalyst and hermeneuticist Gemma Corradi Fiumara.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1996).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Listening to each other should not be seen as the road to consensus. Conflict does not contradict a scenario of listening; it must be in play to safeguard the recognition of and place for difference. Certainly, listening is a politics of its own: the configuration of who is listening\u200a\u2014\u200ato what, how, and why\u200a\u2014\u200aand who is or is not being heard will necessarily come into the picture. The process of listening is, as poet Fiona Sampson has stressed, always incomplete and imperfect. Yet, if we want to transform the relations of power within Western democracy, then looking to initiatives in which active listening is valued as a crucial mode of democratic participation would appear an important place to start. <\/p>\n![\"Harun](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO03_Fournier_Farocki_Videograms-of-a-Revolution-2-scaled.jpg\")
Videograms of a Revolution<\/em>, video still, 1992.
Photo : \u00a9 Harun Farocki\/Andrei Ujic\u0103, courtesy of Harun Farocki GbR<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<n.pr\/2m8b5yD>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Alex](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO03_Fournier_AlexMartinisRoe_Writing-Histories-\u2014-Forms-scaled.jpg\")
Writing Histories \u2014 Forms<\/em>, detail from the project, Frameworks for Exchange Workshop<\/em>, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2011.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Alex](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO03_Fournier_AlexMartinisRoe_TheFirstExchange-2-scaled.jpg\")
The First Exchange<\/em>, postcard from Luce Irigaray to the artist, 2011.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
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at ar\/ge Kunst,\u201d Mousse <\/em>(May 2017),<bit.ly\/2j3B4I2>.<\/span>Through telling and listening, the women engage in a practice of self-narrating that takes the awareness of their own experience, and the opening up to the other\u2019s, as astarting point.<\/em> The relationship develops as the women gradually access each other\u2019s political spheres. What is created is a political space of co-appearance based on difference rather than sameness and in which each is recognized as being unique even as they work together on a common project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Alex](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO03_Fournier_AlexMartinisRoe_To-Become-Two_01-scaled.jpg\")
To Become Two<\/em>, installation views, ar\/ge kunst, Bolzano, 2017. Collaborators : Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga (exhibition design) & Chiara Figone (graphic design)
Photos : Tiberio Sorvillo, courtesy of the artist
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Alex](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO03_Fournier_AlexMartinisRoe_To-Become-Two_02-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Alex](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/92_DO03_Fournier_AlexMartinisRoe_Our-Future-Network-2.jpg\")
Our Future Network<\/em>, video still of the proposition, The Practice of (Public) Speaking)<\/em>, in collaboration with C\u00e9cile Bally, 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist
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