Time to Listen: Program Day 2

DAY TWO: Saturday, 27 June 2026

13:00  Registration and welcome coffee | Foyer

13:30-14:15 Team keynote 

Music and Multispecies Justice; Listening, Consent and Continuation by Liza Lim, Kate Milligan, Nardi Simpson & Vic McEwan (in absentia)
This talk examines music‑making and listening practices through the lens of multispecies justice, with particular attention to questions of consent and continuation in more‑than‑human relations. Drawing on sound studies, Indigenous and ecological philosophies, and contemporary artistic practice, it asks how agency, vulnerability, and participation are negotiated when animals, plants, ecosystems, and technologies are engaged as sonic collaborators. Rather than assuming availability or extractability, this discussion proposes consent as an ethical and methodological problem whose responsibilities do not end with participation but extend across time and relation. By reframing listening as a situated and ongoing practice, it explores how music may operate as a site for sustaining responsibility, reciprocity, and justice across species boundaries.
This presentation provides some insights into the work of ‘Resonant Earth: Music, ecology & climate justice’ (officially: ‘Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication’), a 5-year research project funded by the Australian Research Council led by Liza Lim. An extended team of 12 people includes the presenters: postdoctoral researcher, author, and composer Nardi Simpson; postdoctoral researcher and interdisciplinary artist Vic McEwan, and PhD researcher and composer Kate Milligan. 

14:30-15:15 Two Parallel Sessions 

• Kristine Tjøgersen: Composing with the world of those who sing in the dark and communicate on different frequencies | Studiofoyer
  When the sun goes down, a new world comes to life that most of us know little about. Although we share physical space with its inhabitants, we rarely meet them, since evolution has given them senses that we humans do not have—senses that allow them to rule the night just as we rule the day.
  Kristine Tjøgersen will talk about her compositions Night Lives (2023) and Liminal Beings (2026) and her excursion into this shrouded world of nocturnal creatures, trying to uncover and convey the communication of bats, moths, owls, micro-organisms, and other nighttime dwellers.
  The pieces are produced in a multidisciplinary collaboration with scenographer and performer Ellen Jerstad, visual artist and lighting designer Evelina Dembacke, and biologist and writer Hanna Bjørgaas, with the goal of immersing audiences in wonders that are beyond our human eyes and ears. 
   
• Radio Otherwise: Tuning in to the Acoustic Commons: radio, waterways, and collective listening | Clubraum
  In contrast to field recording, live radio and audio streams resist closure: they unfold in real time, remaining bound to the temporalities and material conditions of the places from which they emanate. Listening becomes less about collecting or owning and more about sustaining attention. Collective listening is a premise of radio—even if collectivity is dispersed—rather than the individualised listening of on-demand media. This collectivity also emanates out of an understanding that the sonic environment is shared and collectively produced, inhabited, and perceived by human and more-than-human actors: what is also known as the acoustic commons. If creativity emerges from relation rather than authorship, then live audio streams—porous, durational, unrepeatable—may be one of its more honest forms. 
  Radio Otherwise will set up multiple microphones, hydrophones, antennas and receivers on the Insola floating platform at Rummelsburg Bay in Berlin, and transmit these signals live to the Academy of the Arts. Our contribution will blend listening to these inputs and infrastructures with reflections on previous durational transmission works that brought together parallels between waterways and electromagnetic transmission as infrastructures of flow—in terms of more-than-human agency, human access to and infiltration of these systems, as well as leakages and disturbances.
  Radio Otherwise (Monaí de Paula Antunes, Kate Donovan, Niko de Paula Lefort) is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the plurality of experiences in radio-making through ecological thinking.

15:15-15:30 Coffee Break | Sesselclub

15:30-16:30 Two Parallel Sessions

• Masimba Hwati: A Planted Ear: Bio-Legislative Earth and Multispecies Listening in Chidzimbahwe Sonic Philosophies | Studiofoyer
  This presentation introduces Chidzimbahwe Sonic Philosophies as an Indigenous Earth-ical/ethical terra ancestral ontology for multispecies listening, creativity, and ecological jurisprudence. It argues that sound is not merely aesthetic, but a relational force through which humans, non-humans, ancestors, and environments co-create ethical worlds. Within this ontology, the Earth is a bio-legislative and bio-affectionate presence that listens, registers, remembers, and responds. Through integrated practices such as cultivating a “planted ear” (kuisa nzeve pasi), kucherera rukuvhute, and honoring Inkaba, humans are implicated and imbricated into Earth’s living circuitry from birth. Drawing on proverbs, ritual practices, and liberation-era sonic strategies, the session explores sound as vibration, archive, and ethical medium. It proposes that listening is reciprocal, grounding an ethics of humble and intimate custodianship (kuteerera) where humans act as accountable participants within a shared vibrational ecosystem.
  See: Masimba Hwati: Chidzimbahwe Philosophies of Sound: An Ethics of a Humble and Intimate Custodianship, 2026.
   
• Camilla Bork/Mathias Hinke: How many times has the world already ended? Musical laments between the simulacrum of nature, destroyed worlds, and collective listening. | Clubraum
  Listening Session with Theoretical Impulses
  The aim of this conference is to react to planetary crisis by decentering anthropocentric listening and situating sound. In European art discourse, this planetary ecological crisis is often narrated in the singular as the impending end of our world and the loss of a pristine nature that must be protected and represented. The proposed session begins precisely here. It poses questions about the prevailing conceptions of nature in such narratives, the political ramifications they entail, and the shift in perspective which takes place when discussing destroyed worlds instead of endangered nature. The session is a guided listening session with brief theoretical prompts. Participants will listen to several short excerpts, and after each one, a guiding question will be posed. Which world is being mourned here? Who is mourning? Which order has been destroyed? Which losses are remembered, and which remain inaudible? These works do not illustrate preconceived theories. Rather, listening together becomes the method itself. This method opens up a space in which aesthetic form, political history, and ecological fragility can be related to one another.

16:30 Coffee Break | Sesselclub

16:45-17:30 Final Discussion: What we take forward? Moderation: Martina Seeber | Studiofoyer
In the closing discussion, we want to compile and evaluate the conference’s findings and identify questions that arise from them and which can be addressed at a future conference. We would also like to revisit the questions from the previous day’s World Café and evaluate the specific field of action which arises through sound. Can contemporary artistic practices and collective ways of life become transformative forces, and what structural conditions must be created to enable this?

Starting at 18:00 spreeklänge. A musical path about and along the water
Eleven international composers were invited to compose new works for specific locations along Berlin’s largest waterway—as a response to the respective geographical site and urban environment, as well as to local and global knowledge of water and multi-species ecosystems. ‘spreeklänge’ create immersive soundscapes while also addressing questions regarding the significance of water in indigenous communities and the rights and dignity of rivers and non-human beings. The project’s acoustic-relational space spans from Philippine stalactite caves to the sounds of water that can only be perceived through the body, to an encounter with diverse bat species along the Faule Spree. Utopias are staged with singers in rowboats, field names of the West and the East part of the river Spree are recited, and an Andean sound cosmos is brought to life by students.

Composers: Peter Ablinger, Cathy van Eck, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Stephan Froleyks, Carlos Gutiérrez & Tatiana López, Susie Ibarra, Liza Lim, Kate Milligan, Trond Reinholdtsen, Annette Schmucki, Kristine Tjøgersen

With: Evelina Dembacke, Die Maulwerker, ELISION Ensemble, Fernanda Farah, Frauenchor der Künste Berlin, Karin Hellqvist, Ellen Jerstad, Christian Kesten, Jake Landau, Tatiana López, Phusiris de los Andes, Selbstgebaute Musik, Bilawa Ade Respati, Schüler*innen (Heinz-Berggruen-Gymnasium/Schinkel Grundschule), Lars A. Skoglund, Studierende der Universität der Künste und FU Berlin, Jennifer Torrence

Artistic direction: Julia Gerlach, Daniel Ott
Akademie der Künste Berlin

From Caprivibrücke to Rohrdammbrücke in Berlin-Charlottenburg
Entry every 15 minutes in time slots from 6 to 7:45 pm
Entry at the Rosengarten by the Caprivibrücke (U7 Richard-Wagner-Platz)
Finish at Ruhwaldweg by the Rohrdammbrücke (shuttle to U7)

Info und tickets: adk.de/spreeklaenge