Please join us for the Sonic Architectures series hosted by the Royal College of Art School of Architecture. As part of the series, Gascia Ouzounian and Mhamad Safa will present a joint conversation on ‘Counterlistening’ (details below).
December 12, 6.30-8 PM Lecture Theatre 1, Darwin Building, Kensington Campus.
To register, please visit the RCA School of Architecture site.
In this talk, interdisciplinary researchers Mhamad Safa (Royal College of Art) and Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford) discuss different approaches to ‘counterlistening’: listening against official and hegemonic narratives of contested events, including in the contexts of war and genocide; and listening for sounds and voices that have been occluded and erased, particularly in the aftermath of mass violence. They discuss different approaches to listening as a tactics and mode of resistance in their own work and others, drawing attention to forensic listening projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and others; analyzing earwitness testimonies; ‘speculative listening’ (Hartman) to denialist and colonialist archives; and ‘urgent listening’ (Kurda) in times of crisis. The conversation will also reflect on critical approaches to sonic architecture and sonic urbanism, understanding the sonic city as a site of political and social contests and a field in which power relations are expressed and manifested, including in the cases of sonic warfare and atmospheric violence.
Mhamad Safa is a London-based sound artist and architect whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University in 2019 and received his PhD in Law from the University of Westminster in 2024. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architecture and Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Safa had shown individual and collaborative artwork and performances at the Bergen Assembly 2022 (Norway), Goteborg Biennial 2021 (Sweden), Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019 and Alserkal Arts Foundation (UAE), Sursock Museum and Goethe Institute (Lebanon), The Institute of Contemporary Arts (United Kingdom), among others.
The Sonic Architectures series is organised by Mark Campbell, Mhamad Safa, and Ines Weizman.