To listen is to be at the encounter with an other
Alejandra Borea, Kika Echeverría, Javier Vargas, Eli Wewentxu
A gathering of sonic counter-cartographies — four Latin American practices that treat listening as a political gesture.
What does it mean to listen to someone, somewhere, or something that dominant narratives have rendered inaudible? To listen is to be at the encounter with an other brings together four artistic practices connected to Latin America to explore listening as a political gesture and a way of engaging with migration, memory, territory, and resistance.
Through sound installations, sculptural interventions, archival recordings, and experimental forms of transmission, the exhibition questions the structures that determine which voices are heard, which histories are preserved, and which experiences remain at the margins of collective attention. It approaches sound as an autonomous form of knowledge, capable of holding experiences that visual and textual representations often leave behind.
Four ways of listening
Ale Borea’s Listening Post — two short-range FM transmissions, a radio receiver, headphones, and archival documents — examines listening as surveillance. Drawing on the archive of the artist’s grandfather, who worked in radar and telecommunications for the Peruvian Armed Forces during the leftist military dictatorship, it traces how listening becomes an instrument of detection, classification, and control, and what is dismissed as noise.
Kika Echeverría’s Tiny dots began to emerge activates the sonic memory of Chilean exile through archival radio transmissions and repurposed antennas. Javier Vargas’s I hear your steps from my room is a sculptural triptych of painting, experimental speakers, and a kinetic instrument, exploring the sounds that emerge from memory, isolation, and absence. Eli Wewentxu’s Pitxantu: Sound Archives comes from deep-listening practice in the native forests of Wallmapu, documenting a territory transformed by drought, monoculture plantations, and ongoing colonial pressures.
Rather than treating noise as interference, the exhibition understands it as a condition of encounter. Listening here is not necessarily understanding or agreement, but an openness to difference, friction, and the possibility of being transformed by what we hear.
Public programme
- Thursday 5 November, 19:00 — Exhibition opening.
- Saturday 7 November, 19:00 — Artist talk.
- Saturday 14 November, 17:30–19:00 — Hearing the Lights Elsewhere III, video screening and conversation curated by VideoClub World.
- Thursday 19 November, 18:00–19:00 — Eli Wewentxu + bungalovv, acoustic performance (suggested donation 10 €).
- Friday 20 November, 19:00 — Finissage with a listening / DJ set by Dracaena.
Credits
Curated by Helga Elsner Torres, Pablo Santacana López, and Vicente Barriga, To listen is to be at the encounter with an other is a Berlin-based project by Karne Kunst gUG, presented at Bardo Projektraum under the artistic direction of Marcela Villanueva . Bardo team: Florencia Freis and Rocío Martínez. Public programme with VideoClub World, Dracaena, and Eli Wewentxu.
