Situated listenings
Situated Listenings invites us to explore listening as a fundamental act in our relationship with the world. Conceived as a space for learning, research, and practice, the programme intertwines sonic arts, ecological thinking, and sound studies, aiming to broaden and enrich our ways of paying attention and inhabiting.
From a transdisciplinary approach, the programme investigates how sound and aurality reconfigure a culture centred on the visual and shaped by rhythms of distraction, immediacy, and superficiality. Sonic arts emerge as an expansive field that transcends the boundaries of music and art, inviting us to discover new ways of thinking, creating, and connecting through listening. Listening unfolds as a relational and potentially transformative practice—a form of active and situated attention that integrates the bodily, mental, and affective dimensions.
Situated Listenings seeks to cultivate an aural sensitivity attuned to contemporary challenges: eco-social crises, the need to rethink our relationships with the more-than-human, and the urgency of imagining new forms of coexistence. The programme proposes listening as a tool for research, reflection, and intervention in the spaces we inhabit, encompassing perspectives ranging from the local to the planetary. The city and everyday contexts become territories of experimentation and action, where human and non-human dynamics converge to reveal complex sound ecologies.
The programme begins with the inaugural lecture How the World Makes Itself Heard by anthropologist Tim Ingold, a key figure in understanding the relationships between the environment and human experience. Activities include a two-part course facilitated by Pablo Sanz, two in-person workshops by katrinem & Sam Auinger and Maria Andueza, as well as six online masterclasses featuring international guests: Makis Solomos, Elena Biserna, Usue Ruiz Arana, Brandon LaBelle, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Ana Lidia Domínguez Ruiz.
Registration is flexible, allowing participants to join individual workshops and online sessions, choose one of the two course modules, or enrol in the full programme, which includes all activities.
Curated and facilitated by: Pablo Sanz is an artist and researcher. His work includes site-specific and public art projects, immersive spatial audio installations and concerts, and compositions shared through exhibitions, broadcasts, and releases.
His work has been presented in international institutions and festivals such as Museo Reina Sofía, Matadero (Madrid), MuseumsQuartier (Vienna), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (Gran Canaria), and Cafe OTO (London), among others. He has participated in multiple artistic residencies and has received awards and support, including a Phonurgia Nova Award for strange strangers, a work commissioned by Czech Radio and published on the Vertical Music label.
He holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, Queen's University Belfast. He has given seminars and workshops in several countries and teaches in the Master's Degree in Electroacoustic Composition at CSKG and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
