Listening Walkers. Sound expeditions.

Event details

“Listening Walkers. Sound expeditions to rediscover the territory”
A group walk of deep listening simultaneously between the city of Rosario (Argentina) and the Paraná River, and the area of Prespa (Greece) and its lakes, with the aim of re-discovering the territory from the sense of hearing. Attentive listening – in which the whole body is engaged in some way, and the mind quiets down – gives us the possibility of re-knowing and re-connecting with our own body and the territory. An opportunity to address the profound need to re-territorialize and re-embody after a year of confinement and virtuality due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Why to walk, why to listen
In this context of a pandemic, where confinement and distancing were installed as a global policy on bodies, it is imperative to have a bodily experience of the territory.

The deep listening walks are a proposal that allows us to connect with the body, with perception and the senses, with others, and the body with the environment, the territory that sustains us. It is a possible way to experience the eco-body (Brian Holmes’s concept), that other way of inhabiting the planet that sustains us, experiencing ourselves as an integral part of a whole.

Walking generates “processes of lived and embodied experience in which the environment is transformed and imprinted on the body” (Soledad Martínez, “More than putting one foot in front of the other”).

According to David Le Breton, while walking the person immerses himself in a “full sensoriality that allows him/her to live in the body”, and for Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst walking is “a deeply social activity, since when we walk we enter into a dialogue of correspondence with others and the environment”.

Sound, unlike images, is immersive. It directs us inward, physically connects us with our surroundings, affects us, challenges our emotions and immerses us in a living and temporal world. For all these reasons, and given the predominance of image and vision as an overdeveloped sense (plus a context of physical isolation and deterritorialization), sound is the ideal tool to reconnect with the public, deep listening and attend to the silenced internal.

Possible interconnections: Argentina and Greece, Paraná river and Prespa lakes
We intend to explore possible interconnections between both regions, framed as territories of water, through this walk of simultaneously listening. Rosario is located on the banks of the Paraná River, the second most important in South America. River that forms a large conglomerate of wetlands and biocultural corridors that links the coastline of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina.

What similarities will we find between Rosario and Prespa, between the Paraná River and the lakes, between these regions with such distant waters? And between Argentinian bodies and Greek bodies, what sensibilities, what possible expansions through listening?

Listen to Veronica and Florencia about the shared sound walk they propose.

Walking as a Question

Conference · 109 items