TMLive

Listening With is a sound-practitioner collective dedicated to exploring and forming sonic ways of becoming-with nonhuman others. While the scores in the print publication respond directly to individual chapters, this podcast invites you inside the sound practices of members of the collective; the questions that motivate them and the approaches that they deploy.

This discussion brings together Gascia Ouzounian and Matilde Meireles, collaborators on the research project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism. They discuss Meireles’s Sunnyside, a composition that was recorded entirely in Meireles’s home in Belfast during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns. Sunnyside is a reflection both on the under-appreciated sounds of domestic spaces, and on the relationship of domestic spaces to wider urban infrastructures. They further reflect on Recomposing the City, a research network founded in 2013 by Ouzounian and architect Sarah Lappin which has brought together numerous sound artists, architects and urbanists in examining questions around sound and urbanism.

Juan Guillermo Dumay and Ruth Oldham explore the interrelations between sound sources in our immediate environments such as the electromechanical, the geophonic and an inaudible planetary hum.

This episode focuses on the key residential structure in the city – the concrete icon, the promise of high-rise living, the ghetto – through a discussion with writer Alison Irvine, author of novels This Road is Red (2011) and Cat Step (2020), and cartoonist Matthew Dooley, author of graphic novel Flake (2020), who both set their contributions to Concrete and Ink in tower blocks.

Staging Cities is a new podcast from Theatrum Mundi, looking at ideas on the intersection of stagecraft, architecture and urban planning. We are borrowing from the toolkit of theatre-making to think about city-making. These new podcasts accompany a series of books we are working on with nai010 publishers from Rotterdam.

Hosted by Marta Michalowska, Theatrum Mundi

Sound design and editing by Philippe Frau-Nadal

The second episode of Staging Cities looks at retail palaces and cultural icons over a conversation with writer Alia Trabucco Zerán, shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her novel The Remainder (La Resta), and artist Bedwyr Williams, whose work was exhibited at Barbican Art Gallery, London, Whitworth ArtGallery, Manchester, and Tramway, Glasgow, among many other institutions.

Staging Cities is a new podcast from Theatrum Mundi, looking at ideas on the intersection of stagecraft, architecture and urban planning. We are borrowing from the toolkit of theatre-making to think about city-making. These new podcasts accompany a series of books we are working on with nai010 publishers from Rotterdam.

Hosted by Marta Michalowska, Theatrum Mundi

Sound design and editing by Philippe Frau-Nadal

The final episode in the first series of Staging Cities looks at improvised structures, radical ideas, nature and science in cities over a conversation with writer Sophie Mackintosh, whose debut novel The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, and artist and writer Crystal Bennes, whose writing on architecture and design has appeared in international publications including Icon, Frieze, Disegno and Metropolis.

Staging Cities is a new podcast from Theatrum Mundi, looking at ideas on the intersection of stagecraft, architecture and urban planning. We are borrowing from the toolkit of theatre-making to think about city-making. These new podcasts accompany a series of books we are working on with nai010 publishers from Rotterdam.

Hosted by Marta Michalowska, Theatrum Mundi

Sound design and editing by Philippe Frau-Nadal

What are the different meanings of magic? How can imagination empower us? Does solidarity require an identity, a social or political filiation?

This is part one of a conversation with Federico Campagna and Chiara Ambrosio, where we discuss Federico's book Magic and Technic: the Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury 2018), and Chiara Ambrosio’s film La Frequenza Fantasma (The Phantom Frequency, 2014). Both authors posit magic as a frame of reality for understanding and experiencing the world, and subverting social hierarchies.

Federico Campagna is a philosopher and writer based in London. His research combines metaphysics, theology and cultural studies, with the aim of exploring fundamental strategies for emancipation in the 21st century.

Chiara Ambrosio is a filmmaker and visual artist based in London, working with animation, documentary, sound and the printed matter.

Curated and hosted by Andrea Cetrulo

Intro music by William Messenger and Sophrosyne

Illustration by Sophie Rogers for Theatrum Mundi

Design by Marcos Villalba

How can architecture defy stark materialism and open up to porousness and the unexpected? What does the resurgence in the interest in magic and ritual tell us about the future?

Therapeutical Infrastructures is the second part of a conversation between philosopher and writer Federico Campagna, and filmmaker and visual artist Chiara Ambrosio. Following the first episode Reality as Magic, Chiara tells us more about the intriguing Neapolitan cult of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio, Federico talks hospitality and finding therapeutical effects in non-human entities such as books, and reflects on where to find the ineffable in our contemporary cities.

Federico Campagna is a philosopher and writer based in London. His research combines metaphysics, theology and cultural studies, with the aim of exploring fundamental strategies for emancipation in the 21st century.

Chiara Ambrosio is a filmmaker and visual artist based in London, working with animation, documentary, sound and the printed matter.

Curated and hosted by Andrea Cetrulo

Intro music by William Messenger and Sophrosyne

Illustration by Sophie Rogers for Theatrum Mundi

Design by Marcos Villalba

Is it possible to create spaces for secrecy, alterity and non-conformity in our surveillance cities through dance and ritual? Can purposely disorienting oneself in familiar places open new doors of perception to reality?

Founder of practitioner run press Scarlet Imprint and dancer of Japanese avant-garde form, Butoh, Alkistis Dimech, is in conversation with Iranian-American professor of philosophy and enchanting storyteller Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh. We discuss Butoh and mystical practices as ways of claiming spaces for spirituality that are being effaced from our cities of surveillance. We also talk about identity politics, the meaning of “living space” and the separation of mind and body.

Curated and hosted by Andrea Cetrulo

Intro music by William Messenger and Sophrosyne

Illustration by Sophie Rogers for Theatrum Mundi

Design by Marcos Villalba

"In the city, are we offering possibilities for those bodies that are not visible? How are we giving them visibility? Are we ourselves possessed by the spirit of ‘the capital’?” Maria Sideri

In the fourth and final episode of Incantations, artists Mercedes Azpilicueta, Maria Sideri and Angeliki Tzortzakaki discuss their project 'priestesses of disgrace: you bring joy into my life', which interrogates through sound the way female voices are perceived in public spaces in a syncretic city like Athens.

We also discuss the perception of women’s bodies as simultaneously sinful and healing across different cultural contexts, and how ritualistic possession can be used to resist oppressive hierarchical structures.

Our guests also share their own personal rituals for creating moods and attune to the cities they live in.

Curated and hosted by Andrea Cetrulo

Intro music by William Messenger and Sophrosyne

Illustration by Sophie Rogers for Theatrum Mundi

Design by Marcos Villalba