Together with La Loge and Goethe Institut Brussels
Listening Other·Wise, a 24-h public programme about listening took place at La Loge on December 12 and 13, 2025.
With Leah Bassel, Nina Emge, Mort Drew, Loré Lixenberg, Roberta Miss, Sharon Stewart et Karen Willems
Access programme booklet here.
Bringing together sound and vocal performances, audio streams, reading sessions, deep listening exercises, DJ sets, and lecture performances, the event unfolded as an exploration of listening in its many forms. It moved through sounding ecologies and the politics of sound, attending to the ways in which listening can unsettle, connect, and reimagine our relations with one another and the world. It sought to question and reflect on listening as a practice with emancipatory potential – one that opens up new sorts of relations and collective experiences.
The event was based on Nele Möller’s project, The Forest Echoes Back – an ongoing live audio broadcast from a site in the Thuringian Forest in Germany, which was recently cut down by forest management to stop the spread of the bark beetle. The audio stream was installed in the summer of 2023 to transmit the changing acoustic environment of this forest, which is slowly disappearing due to monoculture plantings, human-made climate change, and bark beetle outbreaks. For Listening Other·Wise, Möller further developed and expanded the concept of collective, slow, and long-durational listening to explore questions of simultaneities and entanglements of different places. Central to the concept are the relationships between various states of consciousness and how they influence our listening response-abilities.
In addition to the Forest stream, Möller selected various projects and Locus Sonus audio streams from specific sites, which were sometimes be mixed together. They drew on an immersive soundscape in which the audience is invited to sit, lie down, and/or sleep during the night, until the awakening sound session in the morning. Over the course of the event, other invited guest-participants attuned themselves to the selected live audio streams transmitted. Each offered a unique response, informed by their own ways of conceiving listening – as a practice, method, or mode of relation.
By approaching listening as a polyphonic form of sharing and relationality (as described by Rolando Vázquez) and a co-constitutive process that shapes our interdependence with human and more-than-human bodies, the event called for a shift of attention. It invited to focus not on listening as an isolated act, but on the relations, responsibilities, and forms of reciprocity it generates. Listening thus becomes a political gesture: a way to reconfigure how we inhabit the world together, how we acknowledge voices, and how we resist hegemonic ways of knowing and speaking.
The event is part of the trans-regional project on the topic of listening that the European Goethe- Instituts will be implementing in 2026 and 2027.
A forest of thanks to La Loge, Goethe Institut Brussels, Antoinette Jattiot, Nadine Droste, Maxime Cointement, Ludo Engels, Soundcamp, Locus Sonus, Michael Möller, Matthias Wetzel, Rudi Greiner, LUCA School of Arts Brussels, and all the stream care takers that shared information and their stream for the event: Ears in Space, HomeSounds, Cyberforest, Alice Eldridge, Kathy Hinde, Jan Krticka, Rob Mackay, Lia Mazzari, Udo Noll, Maria Papadomanolaki, Julian Patterson, Teresa Schumaker, Wave Farm, Weather Report.
Nele Moeller 