Cense Symposium: Beyond Listening 2025

But what does it truly mean to listen to the world’s condition? What kinds of responsibilities arise from becoming attuned to it? Awareness alone may not be sufficient. What actions can we imagine that build upon the insights gained through listening, helping us move forward – or perhaps even backward, to better understand the roots of the challenges we face?

That event in chilly Budapest was carefully tuned to explore how we might move beyond listening and sketch, at least tentatively, possible directions forward. However, while acknowledging the transformative power of listening, we also pondered: do we sometimes expect too much from it? What other actions must precede, accompany, and follow listening in order to foster the change we hope for? How can the increasingly palpable transformations across our environments be addressed, locally and collectively, beyond the act of listening itself?

Organised by the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE), the symposium did not seek to offer any direct prescriptions – nor should it have. Listening rarely leads to definitive conclusions; rather, it unsettles them, opening avenues that might otherwise remain imperceptible or inconvenient to pursue. Nevertheless, the symposium left behind something more concrete: a series of resonant reflections affirming that listening matters, reflections which participants carried back into their communities, wetlands, saltworks, estuaries, forests, and other places of care and custodianship from which they had come.

Another tangible outcome emerged almost immediately – one that, considering the richness of perspectives shared during those intense days, was, in some ways, inevitable to foresee (or forehear). It became clear that we need more time, more space, and a more closely aligned network in order to stay with and work through these questions. Thus, BEYOND LISTENING 2025: WALKING-WITH CHANGES – the very event unfolding here in Ljubljana, back-to-back with the TO)pot festival – carries the ambition to continue moving us, slowly and attentively, while immersed in the act of listening but also towards its beyond.

Writing in her inspiring Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit suggests that “walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” To attend to the condition of our planet, is to allow oneself to walk with it. And by implication, to allow the planet – and diverse ways through which its complexities manifest themselves locally – to walk through our minds and bodies, “without being made busy by them”, to quote Solnit once more.

What modalities of listening – and walking-with – can we engage with today to inspire new perspectives, or regenerate old but meaningful ones, on the environmental changes that affect us all? What would it mean to slow down and, rather than rushing to solve these challenges, walk with the troubles and give them the hearing they require? How might we persuade those troubles to walk alongside us, rather than overtaking us – or trampling upon our best intentions?

This event turns to walking as a critical and creative method of inquiry, which – when coupled with the transformative power of listening – may help us develop new modes of sensing and knowing the transforming world around us. Through an open call for papers, peripatetic or performative lectures, and listening posters, we invited artists and scholars to engage with a broad and yet interconnected range of themes, including: Walking-with changes – rethinking walking as a method of inquiry and approaching listening with one’s feet; Listening-with and beyond disciplines – exploring the convergence of art, science, and technology within sonic ecosystems; Staying-with solastalgia– addressing the distress induced by environmental change in our home environments;

Resonating-with lessons from listening to the Anthropocene – confronting inequality, discrimination, and social injustice; Being-with other-than-human sonic environments – engaging ecoacoustics, bioacoustics, and environmental activism; and Rethinking-with local and regional, historical and contemporary epistemologies and ethics of environmental awareness.

The symposium also marks an important moment for the CENSE community. After the event in Budapest, it became clear that CENSE makes sense – but that its purpose can only be sustained and developed if we, as artists, scholars, and activists from the region, unite around the most pressing aspects of our contemporary reality, both here and beyond. Following Budapest, and through a series of online meetings, we began a process of reflecting on the network’s legacy while drafting a vision for its future. As a result, we collectively arrived at a renewed mission that places the protection and restoration of soundscapes, through interdisciplinary activities, at its core. After re-registering the network in Wrocław, Poland, we are now committed to building a solid foundation for future collaborations and initiatives – such as this one, in Ljubljana.

We believe that voices from our region must be heard more strongly, especially today, amid geopolitical tensions, existential instabilities, and the growing recognition of epistemic and imperialistic violence that has historically disciplined this region – a violence that some liken to a form of colonialism. By “voices”, we mean not only those of individuals and human communities but also those of other-than-human entities. Our voice is not meant to stand in opposition to other voices across the continent or the world. While Western Europe – and the West more broadly – has historically neglected voices from Central and Eastern Europe, we see no space for reactionary attitudes. Therefore, our network remains open to all who share our concerns for acoustic environments and, through them, for all their actors – human and more-than-human – those participating in shaping these environments, and particularly those who have been, and continue to be, excluded from doing so.

With sincere thanks to the organisers of the TO)pot festival who invited and made room for the symposium back-to-back with their programme of soundwalks, we invite you to walk with CENSE as it undergoes necessary transformations. Through a rich array of presentations, we hope you will find yourself not only in a state of resonance but also, perhaps, in a state of productive dissonance – attuned to and in critical dialogue with the diverse ways in which listening can inspire meaningful action.

Jacek Smolicki,
Interim Chair
On behalf of the board of CENSE