Becoming fireflies: practices of radio, affective listening and transversal transmission
The Fondazione Lac o Le Mon hosts an invitation from Silvia Maglioni, Nikolay Oleynikov, Alessandra Pomarico, and Graeme Thomson, which is supported by Ecoversities Alliance and Free Home University)
San Cesario di Lecce, 9-13 August 2022
Firefly Frequencies is a radio platform that brings together artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, activists, theorists and other collaborators from many different countries. For them radio is first and foremost a place of gathering where multiple voices can meet, mix, transform. A membrane, a communal body that perpetually reinvents itself through different modalities and temporalities, through the dimensions of creation and care and the shared powers of reception and receptivity.
They founded Firefly Frequencies towards the end of 2020 as a site of learning and unlearning, a fugitive dwelling place that asks to attune ourselves as much to the material body of sound and to the sounds and silences of bodies as to the contents of what they express and transmit. A place that interweaves music, sound-art, poetry, storytelling, live performance, conversation, readings, radical politics and the co-construction of alternative knowledges and pedagogies.
This gathering at the Casa Cafausica from the 10th to the 13th of August will focus on practices of affective and deep listening, the kind of listening that is both receptive and that generates responsive modes of sonic expression. In a spirit of co-learning, they will experiment with radio and podcasting in terms of their potentials for sounding, archiving, montage, mixing and commoning within a broad spectrum of temporalities, discourses, sounds and localities. In parallel, they will consider the sonic and radiophonic potentials of sharing the space and living together. In this way, they will consider radio as a space where voices can rethink their place in relation to other sounds and soundings between the human and the non-human. A space for healing, for being together with vibrations, silences and invisible forces, the magic of sonic gifts. A place for solidarity, improvisation, refusal, memory, invention. A place that connects with other spaces and worlds, ‘where the living can dance with the dead’.
The days will be punctuated by a series of exercises in attunement, focusing on listening to the surroundings, to the sounding body, to each other and local communities in order to develop together forms of radical attentiveness inspired by the practice of ‘deep listening’ pioneered by Pauline Oliveros among others.
Living communally, collectively preparing meals and taking care of the house will be part of their shared time-space.
Arrival on Tuesday 09/8
Day 1 Wednesday 10/8
9. 30 somatic awakening and breakfast
morning playlist proposed by the hosts
10. 30 Orientation, meet and greet
11.30 Deep listening exercise from Pauline Oliveros guidebooks
13.00 Lunch preparation and lunch break
15.30 Introduction to Firefly Frequencies and its methodologies (with selected listening and exploration of different sections)
16.30 Introduction to Spreaker, Prismic and Audacity + co-learning basic recording and editing skills (towards making a ‘Voicing’)
17.30 Ways of Listening:
collective discussion of the kind of radio we want to make and how
18.30 Break
19.30 Collective evening meal preparation followed by dinner
22.00 Evening musicking session (using instruments and improvised tools) and sharing material from participants
Day 2 Thursday 11/8
9. 30 somatic awakening and breakfast (with morning playlist proposed by the hosts)
11.00 Group reading (proposal: Hildegard Westerkamp – Soundwalking)
12.30 Lunch preparation and lunch break
15.00 Afternoon soundwalk and field recording
16.30 Working with a digital audio workstation (Audacity, Live etc) and other tools, co-learning basic mixing techniques
17.00 Making a ‘Biophonic assemblage’ (from the soundwalk recordings)
18.30 Sharing from participants and Listening
19.30 Collective evening meal preparation
22.30 sharing more and improvisation
Day 3 Friday 12/8
9.30 Somatic exercise / Meditation / Breathing
10,00 Breakfast (with morning playlist)
10.30 Deep Listening (Suggested exercise: ‘Additive ambience’)
11.30 Radio Galaxy: a collective exploration of alternative radio stations
12.30 Lunch preparation and lunch break
14.30 Group reading (proposal: Tetsuo Kogawa – Polymorphous Radio)
15.30 Break/ siesta
16.30 Exploring the digital undercommons and experimenting techniques to create an ‘Ambient thought’
18.00 Listening / feedback/ sharing material from participants
20.00 Collective evening meal preparation (with experimental recording for ‘Recipes for Disaster’) followed by dinner and kitchen musicking
Day 4 Saturday 13/8
9.30 somatic practices and Breakfast
10.30 Group reading (proposal: Ultra-Red – Ten Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation)
12.00 – 14-00 Lunch with guests from local community
14.30 Creation of a podcast choosing from the various recorded material (to upload on Firefly Frequencies)
18.30 Listening, sharing from participant, and plans for the futurities of fff
20.00 Final dinner / Dance Party open to friends and visitors
Day 5th, Sunday 14/08
Breakfast, collective cleaning
https://fhu.art/becoming-fireflies-practices-of-radio-affective-listening
fondazione lac o le mon 