Brandon LaBelle
Brandon LaBelle (born 1969 in Memphis, Tennessee, United States) is an artist, writer and theorist working with questions of social life and cultural agency, using sound, performance, text and sited constructions. He develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, often working collaboratively and in public. This leads to interventions and performative installations, voice work, and micro-actions aimed at the sphere of the (un)common and the unlikely. Brandon LaBelle received a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1998 and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the London Consortium in 2005. From 2006 to 2009 he worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Modern Culture, University of Copenhagen, and since 2007 he is living in Berlin. LaBelle has held guest professorships at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, and the Free University, Berlin, as well as a guest lectureship at the Tel Aviv University. He was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Humanities, Cornell University in 2012, and a visiting fellow at the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths College in 2016. In addition, he was an artist in residence at the Museums Quartier, Vienna in 2009, and at the South London Gallery, 2015-16 where he initiated The Living School, an experimental pedagogical platform. He is also an active lecturer working with institutions around the world addressing questions of auditory culture, sonic and spatial arts, and experimental social practices. Current research projects focus on sonic agency, voice and the mouth, poetic knowledge, commonism and the aesthetics and politics of invisibility. Errant Bodies publishes books, audio and video works with a focus on sound and spatial arts, contemporary political and pedagogical thought and research, performative and collaborative practices, and poetic writing. Such areas of focus are developed through establishing specific series, including: audio issues (sonic and auditory research), critical ear (artistic monographs), surface tension (spatial and sited practices), doormats (on speculative political thought and current issues), errant editions (poetics), anthologies (edited volumes), impossible notes (on artistic research), and records (audio and video work). Through his work with Errant Bodies Press he has co-edited the anthologies Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear, Volumes 1 & 2 (1999, 2011), Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (2001), Surface Tension: Problematics of Site (2003) and Radio Territories (2007), along with a series of monographs (Critical Ear series) on sound and media artists. He is the author of “Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art” (Continuum 2006) and "Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life" (Continuum 2010). He is co-organizer of the Surface Tension project and participant within the collaborative team e+l. He lives in Berlin.