Randi Lindholm Hansen
When no one is there to listen to you, we are
To be listened to by our listening staff, receive a peptalk or to leave a message.
The Listening Hotline is open 24/7.
We are looking forward to your call.
Yours sincerely
Bureau for Listening
A confidential phone service where callers can speak freely without response. The listener remains silent, offering only presence. Callers may request a short reflection at the end, based on key themes.
AN INVITATION TO LINGER
This is an invitation to linger. To stay with. To start and to start again. This is an invitation to hold. To discover. Unravel. To speculate, to seed, to doubt, to consider, to question. To listen. To sense. To start.
Bureau for Listening is an artist and research group investigating and promoting listening as critical, empathic, and artistic practice. We work nomadic, transdisciplinary, and strive to engage others in shared practices and projects.
We ask that listening is practiced as a transdisciplinary phenomenon. We understand listening as more than the hearing of audible signals as it supports a range of relevant processes and projects, including: emotional and social recognition, community relations, establishing of attunement and discovery across human and more-than-human worlds, co-learning, and decolonial, eco- feminist initiatives. We consider listening as a creative inquiry and sensitivity; one that stimulates a caring and artistic being-with.
TESTING GROUND: LISTENING 2024
During this artistic research residency at Art Hub Copenhagen, Bureau for Listening explored four distinct listening practices over the course of four months. We examined listening as something that excitingly questions the familiar, assumed and the known and, and with guests artists and researchers, we conducted listening tests, rituals, group conversations, excursions, practice sharings and more. Each thematic exploration ended with a public Listening Event.
Guests included Brandon Labelle, Jenny Gräf Sheppard, Carolyn F. Strauss, Christine Hvidt, Louise Vind Nielsen, Barbora Kováčová, Nana Francisca Schottländer, Elisabeth Holager Lund
FIELDS OF RESEARCH
[…] to listen to the sensory room […] I think it is about such a decoding of some doubt or some wills or a functionality or… but I just need to be able to orient myself, before I can find peace in a room […] and I just often feel that theaters are really good at such… being aware that here comes a person who needs to be inducted. Calibrated to something special. What are these rituals, […] that one triggers people to renegotiate their orientation. That one invites some kind of disorientation in. And creates a new reorientation […] and in what way should we orient ourselves in the spaces? […]
HOW TO LISTEN TO SPACE
Part I
-
Write a list of barriers. Any sort of border or edge that serves to define a type of space.
Part II
-
Find a space you like.
-
Inhabit it.
-
Define it. Separate it from what’s around it. Define its edged.
-
Write a four-step guide on how to settle in to this space.
-
Leave the space.
The Observation Report is a testimonial of time and space. A form of documentation of a given circumstance. The Observation Report is created during an observation session hosted by an experienced observer. The Observation Report is by definition subjective, like observation itself. An observation session lasts between 45 and 90 minutes (longer sessions can be arranged). The time of an observation session is determined by the circumstances of the observed. If no natural time frame is given, we recommend a session of 75 minutes. The setting for an observation session can be anything you wish to have observed and documented. Examples are spaces (empty or occupied), workshops, classes, meetings, rehearsals, events, artistic practices, etc. A copy of the written observation report will be made available to you within 3 days of the observation session. Observation Reporting can also be taught as a workshop.
LABORATORY FOR LISTENING 2023-2025
SPOR Festival
Laboratory for Listening is a 3-year collaboration between Bureau for Listening and SPOR Festival A manifestation of The Bureau and a long-term exploration of activistic and performative listening practices.
FOR VS. OF
Our humble destination is, at this moment, a place to listen for the purpose of listening. We reject ownership (now and forever) of listening, and of being able to define this phenomenon. We have made a deliberate decision to be for listening rather than of listening. We are no authority. We aim to be gentle and present.