Listening Collectively: Acoustic Flows

How are individuals and communities situated within time? What does it mean to be on time, or to keep time? And which time signatures dominate to define the movements and rhythms of society? We’ll engage these questions, bringing critical and creative attention to time and struggles for “temporal agency”.

As the art collective Black Quantum Futurism argues, there is an inherent “chronopolitics” to conceptualisations of time, lending to how communities relate to their pasts and futures as well as the possibility of free movement. Taking stock of theories and practices of time, we’ll develop strategies for listening to the rhythms of a chronopolitical reality, from the rhythms of social life to the ways in which time is weaponised in practices of detention.

The workshop poses a deeper reflection on temporal agency, and how time is racialised, gendered, or politicised to act as a carrier of dominant belief systems. This will lead to identifying key temporal struggles, both for oneself and the communities around us. Moving against these dominant and defining time signatures, we’ll work on mapping a set of counter-times or cosmopoetic rhythms: rhythms and timings articulated so as to support ways of holding or inhabiting time differently.