In celebration of the new publication Poetics of Listening: Inner Life, Social Transformation, Planetary Practices, Brandon LaBelle presents a set of soft seminars posing listening as a means for fostering greater recognition and repair. This includes engaging with the urgencies of hearing and being heard, and how these operate as an acoustic foundation to social justice and the maintenance of communal bonds: listening can be said to commit us to each other in critical ways. These perspectives will be elaborated through a focus on the elemental, including reflections on the potentiality of wet sound and airy listening. By way of speculative thinking and poetic storying, the elemental will be approached as a restorative grounding that keeps one close to the biopoetical – from living waters of oceanic emergence to practices of deep reciprocity found in breathing air – and which supports the flourishing of life worlds.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019–2023), Oficina de Autonomia (2017–ongoing), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014–2016), The Imaginary Republic (2014–2019), Dirty Ear Forum (2013–2022), Surface Tension (2003–2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998–2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).