MA Seminar taught at the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts program at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Summer Semesters 2023 and 2025.
“Woman at the End of the World, I am
I go on, singing till the end”
– Elza Soares, “A Mulher do Fim do Mundo”
This is a Seminar aimed at exploring a collective and speculative thinking with, against, and beyond the end of the world as we know it. We will dive into the many possible meanings of “the end of (this) world,” as well as discuss the role and agency of poetic and artistic practices (including the aural and the sonic) for enabling new worlds and new forms of sense-making. In engaging with radical propositions that understand the artistic and the poetic not only as aesthetic gestures but as deeper modes of being and creating worlds, the Seminar proposes “listening” as something generative, a practice for and with all forms of life, not concerned with “making things known,” while also moving beyond re-centering the “human” as a figure of thinking and knowing.