Close Attention: Cara Tolmie x Ljudhavet

Wednessday 11 November, [doors open 18:30 listening starts 19:00]

Entrance free/ by donation but limited capacity: To reserve a space email parse@konst.gu.se

Sound, so much slower than the speed of light, is always also in delay. We sit across the table from each other and all that you perceive of me is in the past. My voice and body different, distanced, by the microsecond.

What about the ear with interference? The high pitch line above everything? Or the metal buzz at the edges? What about the damaged ear? Or what about the arts of the body attuned: the heart listening for beats, the hand listening for the heart?

Ella Finer, “Acoustic attention, Deep Affiliation and the Work of Listening” Bodies of Sound (2024)

The body does not exist as a detached and sovereign unit… embodiment is a collective binding of profoundly uneven relations of porosity to exposure. My vulnerability to injury is entangled with your comfort.

M Murphy, “Embodied Knowledge by other means” Ecoes, 7. Sonic Acts (2025)

 

Close Attention is an event series learning from artistic practices that foreground attention as a state of doing. This session, in collaboration with Ljudhavet, is the 14th edition of Örats Biograf (Cinema for the ear), a salon of immersive sound and music played over a multichannel sound system.

Cara Tolmie will share part of her recently completed artistic PhD, Internal Singing: Sounding Through Vocalbody Disorientation, reading the autofiction short story Gloamin Veer, that recounts the sensorial landscape that she came to inhabit as a result of a series of concussions, over the sound mix Convalescent Listening. The session is a collective listening experience, framed by group exercises in bodily attunement, and space for discussion. Beginning from the idea that listening is never neutral or detached, themes we will return to include somatic methods, the conditions of listening, disorientation and sensitivity, and listening as a voluntary act that requires presence.

All welcome but limited capacity so please email to secure your place.

Link to Internal Singing, Sounding Through Vocalbody Disorientation: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3043388/3043630]