Open Call: Beyond Listening 2025: Walking-with changes
Open Call: BEYOND LISTENING 2025: WALKING-WITH CHANGES
23–26 SEPTEMBER 2025, LJUBLJANA
Building on the 2023 Beyond Listening: Agency, Art, and the Environment symposium in Budapest and the rich range of subjects discussed there, we invite you to submit a proposal in response to this open call for a follow-up event in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in 2025.
How can we escape from listening paradigms that are based on expansive, colonial, violent, and extractivist approaches? What can we learn from current ethical and political applications of acoustic ecology, acoustic anthropology, and bioacoustics? What can we, as sound artists, scholars, activists, and listeners, do beyond simply witnessing another wave of reports on declining biodiversity and the ongoing collapse of our planet’s systems? How can these ever more tangible transformations taking place on a planetary scale be addressed locally and collectively, beyond the act of listening?
Addressed in Budapest, these and similar questions remain relevant. Therefore, we invite scientists, philosophers, activists, artists, and others to continue listening-with these questions, rethinking them in a manner of being-with, and reposing them through walking-with, while focusing on changes that accompany our everyday lives, but also those that are less obvious and only surface as time passes.
By walking-with and listening to the “cultural turn” toward posthumanism we contribute to a shift in understanding humanity’s place within the world, challenging human exceptionalism and dominance. By walking-with and listening we engage in embodied practices that stimulate awareness of limited planetary resources and humanity’s destructive impact, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Such practices urge us to rethink the relationships with non-human life, technology, and ecosystems, advocating for an ethical shift and interdependent approach, to inspire coexistence for more sustainable futures.
Through changes in the environment, new concepts emerge that give meaning to the way we experience tuning and adjusting to the new conditions of being in the world. One of them is solastalgia. Unlike nostalgia, which refers to sadness due to the absence of home, solastalgia refers to the distress caused by environmental changes in one’s home environment. Glenn Albrecht, the philosopher who coined the term, describes it as “the homesickness you feel even though you are still at home.” Solastalgia is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon in a world facing ecological challenges, significantly impacting mental health and the sense of belonging. How does solastalgia manifest itself in acoustic environments and how can it inform sound practices and actions beyond listening?
Acoustic environments emerge through the complex activities of biological, anthropogenic, and geophysical processes. By paying attention to the practice of conscious listening (to soundscapes, but not exclusively), rather than focusing merely on the visual aspects and qualities of the environment, listeners can attain different kinds of insights and understandings of the surrounding environment. For example, through attentive listening we might be able to observe and understand more details about the relations between various actors, events, and species, and perceive how they change over time. Through embodied and situated listening we might also become more careful and critical observers of power relationships that orchestrate how we navigate our shared environments and negotiate our entanglement within them. We suggest that walking-with, as a way of being, collaborating, connecting, and co-creating with other spaces and environments, goes beyond mere physical movement—it involves presence, listening, and interacting with the stories, sounds, and textures of a place. It emphasises a collective and sensory experience, creating space for an ethical relationship with the world we live in. What modalities of listening- and walking-with can we engage with to inspire new or regenerate old but meaningful perspectives on environmental changes that affect all of us today?
The 2025 CENSE Symposium provides a transdisciplinary forum for sharing recent developments and fostering further exchange, collaboration, communication, and networking. While we pay special attention to Central Europe, the geopolitical range of topics remains open to the broader world.
We are looking for topics that address the potential of sonic ecology in these areas:
_ Walking-with changes: rethinking walking as a method of inquiry, approaching listening-with your feet, soundwalking;
_ Listening-with and beyond disciplines: employing the convergence of art, science, and technology in sonic ecosystems;
_ Staying-with solastalgia: experiencing distress induced by environmental change in our home environment;
_ Resonating-with lessons learnt from listening to the Anthropocene, addressing inequality, discrimination, and social justice;
_ Being-with other-than-human sonic environments (ecoacoustics and bioacoustics) and engagement with environmental activism;
_ Rethinking-with local and regional, historical and contemporary epistemologies and ethics of environmental awareness.
We welcome proposals for papers, presentations, peripatetic lectures, performative lectures, and other unconventional formats to be presented in person at the symposium. We especially encourage challenging, innovative—even provocative—contributions which go beyond traditional formats of papers and talks that dominate academic conferences and symposia. In the selection process, we will prioritise experimental, engaging, and hands-on proposals. We envision the symposium as a place for thorough and significant engagement with and dialogue about the issues that are in our collective interest.
We kindly invite you to submit your proposals through the application form available at this link. The description of the proposal is limited to 1300 characters with spaces. Make sure to add all the information we need to ensure all the requirements for your intervention are met (additional space is available at the end of the application form).
The deadline for applications is 10 February 2025.
Selected applicants will be notified by 15 March 2025.
Compared to the previous edition, the 2025 CENSE Symposium in Ljubljana is planned on a smaller scale. Therefore, the number of selected papers will be limited. Nonetheless, we believe that the symposium will provide a great opportunity to address pertinent themes and emerging challenges of sonic ecology and beyond, especially as it will be organised as part of the Festival of Radical Soundwalks TO)pot.
The 2025 CENSE Symposium has no participation fee. For presenters, access to all symposium and the festival events is provided free of charge. Please note that presenting participants are responsible for covering the costs of their attendance, such as travel costs, accommodation, and meals. Presenters will be provided with an invitation letter.
Contact: symposium@cense.earth
The CENSE Symposium Beyond Listening 2025: Walking-with Changes (Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2025) is produced by CONA Institute, co-organised by the Science and Research Centre Koper, Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies, and facilitated by the Cross-European Network for Sonic Ecologies.
Symposium’s programme board:
Scientific committee: ELENA BISERNA, JACEK SMOLICKI, MAJA BJELICA
Organising committee: IRENA PIVKA, IDA HIRŠENFELDER, MAJA BJELICA
Symposium’s advisory board: Csaba Hajnóczy, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Brane Zorman, Petra Kapš
The Cross-European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE) is a network of diverse voices from the fields of arts, science, and activism. The network works towards an increased awareness of developments in the social and cultural spheres of Central Europe (and beyond) with a particular focus on environmental transformations and their wide-ranging effects. CENSE was established in 2018 during an international conference in Budapest. Since then, three further conferences have taken place: in the Czech Republic Murmurans Mundus in 2019, in Poland in 2020, and in Hungary Beyond Listening: Agency, Art, and the Environment in 2023.
CONA, Institute for Contemporary Art Processing is an NGO from Slovenia. Its main activities are the production and promotion of new media and sound art in connection with nature, the environment, and sound, with the goal of socially and ecologically responsible cultural collaboration. The Festival of Radical Soundwalks TO)pot gathers artists, theorists, and walkers to bring them closer to walking and listening as a spatial acting-out of the place and the body; as practices of reading, creating, grounding, immersing, being acted upon and acting in the environment; as ways of experiencing our myriads of entanglements and interdependencies with other human and non-human beings and the world.
The festival is produced by CONA, financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture. It is hosted by Cukrarna, a partner of the festival TO)pot.
The Science and Research Centre Koper(ZRS Koper) works on an interdisciplinary basis, involving humanities, social and natural sciences, with special emphasis given to research in the specific environments of the Mediterranean and the Upper Adriatic region. Its Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies focuses on contemporary philosophy, social and environmental ethics, comparative religion, digital theology, and feminist studies, and engages in a variety of collaborations across the fields of philosophical and religious studies.
ZRS Koper is collaborating at the symposium within the framework of the basic research project “Grain of Salt, Crystallising Cohabitation: Salt-making as Experiential Environmental Wisdom” (J6-50196) and the research programme “Liminal Spaces: Areas of Cultural and Societal Cohabitation in the Age of Risk and Vulnerability” (P6-0279), which are financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS).
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