Pedro Oliveira

1985, São Paulo.

I am a researcher, sound artist, and educator committed to an anticolonial study of listening and its intersections with violence at the European border. Currently I am Guest Faculty in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin.

Previously I have been a Research and Arts Fellow at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Society; a Postdoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; a lecturer in Musicology and Media Studies at the Humboldt-University Berlin; as well as a teaching and research associate in Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf. I have also done a number of artistic residencies, including the AI Anarchies program of the Junge Akademie der Künste Berlin in partnership with ZK/U; the Max-Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt; IASPIS and the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), both in Stockholm. I am a founding member of the research platform Decolonising Design, and I hold a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin.

In February 2020 I was awarded the second prize of the HASH Award by Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM Karlsruhe.

My work is committed to an anticolonial study of listening and its material intersections with the racialized violences of the European border. I am currently researching the the long histories of technical and machinic listening in Germany, and in particular the historical, aesthetic, and material articulations of the so-called “dialect recognition software,” a bespoke solution in use since 2017 for cases of undocumented asylum seekers in the country. This project has so far been partially funded by the Goethe-Institut Brussels, Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa Berlin, Deutschlandfunk Kultur in collaboration with the CTM Festival, Konstnärsnämnden Sweden, ZKM Karlsruhe in partnership with Akademie Solitude, the Max-Planck Gesellschaft, KONE Foundation Finland, and the Junge Akademie der Künste Berlin.

I also act as a co-curator for the Soy&Synth concert series in collaboration with Soydivision Berlin.

Find me on Twitter, Instagram, ORCID, or per E-mail.

CV and references upon request.