Salomé Voegelin
London College of Communication; University of the Arts London
Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet in the contemporary crises of climate and public health, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities.
She is engaged in the transversal and transdisciplinary potential of the sonic - to listen across disciplines and processes in order to develop a hybridisation of research where arts and humanities skills and methodologies can generate a contemporary response to climate, health and social emergencies.
She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018). These books, as well as her numerous articles and papers, applied working and experimentation, develop a critical understanding of art and the environment as aesthetic, ecological and social, as well as economic and political milieus, whose relational reality and artistic fiction is made accessible through a “sonic thinking”, understood not as essentialist or an anti-visual mode of engagement, but as multi-sensory and response-able, making us “see” more, and appreciative also of what we might not see. Her new book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands, appears with Bloomsbury in early 2023. It moves curation through the double negative of not not to ‘uncuration’: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.
Voegelin’s practice engages in participatory, collective and communal approaches: Between 2014 and up to the Pandemic in 2020 she co-convened, with Mark Peter Wright, the regular cross-disciplinary listening and sound making event Points of Listening www.pointsoflistening.wordpress.com. And since 2008 she collaborates with David Mollin (Mollin+Voegelin) in a practice that reconsiders socio-political, architectural and aesthetic actualities and sites from the blindspots of a leaky vision, and the possibilities of sound, things, voices and texts. Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She is the PI (Principle Investigator) of the UK research council funded project the Sounding Knowledge Network.
She has recently written several articles on and around the topic she will be talking about:
