Listening with CRiSAP #9 - Curating Sound - Uncurating Sound

CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, UAL) celebrates its 20th anniversary with 20 unique episodes for Resonance Extra.

Since 2005, CRiSAP has pioneered new approaches to practice and theory by exploring sound and listening in relation to the environment, gender, technology, feminism, activism, conflict, text, pedagogy and voice. For Resonance Extra, CRiSAP members and friends, past and present, host a range of discussions and soundworks that cover key themes and areas of research across art, performance, symposia, publishing, curation, archives, education and more.

This episode features a discussion on curating and uncurating sound with Irene Revell, Lisa Hall and Salomé Voegelin, and begins with a conversation on the historical role of curation in CRiSAP and the MA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, considering a curatorial pedagogy and the fear of being curated.

From there it contemplates the contemporary curator as researcher, as organiser and as medium, and addresses the politics of the curatorial: how rules of funding, governmental expectations and populist demands drive the curatorial towards simple legibility, and how we could curate its resistance.

Recognising listening as a tool toward this aim, this episode ends on a discussion of the figure of the listening curator as a radical and necessary entity that remains largely elusive.

Tracklist

‘During the night the crop will grow (unless the player sleeps)’, by David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin, 2016
‘Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic’, enactments of the score ‘Beyond the Accident of Time’, by Anne Lanzilotti, 2020. Enactments:
‘Listening across the Biennale’ by Hannah Kemp-Welch, 2024