Sonic Materialism: A Philosophy of Digging and Gardening

This keynote as curatorial performance brings the heard and its audition into the sphere of things rather than into the context of their name and function. It joins a current debate on new materialism by developing via sound and listening the idea of materialism as a materialism of transformation that reconsiders an anthropocentric worldview without bestowing objects with mythical self-determination; and that accounts for the object’s autonomous agency rather than placing it in a mathematical frame. Thus, it involves an unperforming of the lexicon and of numbers, and practices a listening to the invisible by its intensity, expanse and duration, to hear echoes of responsibility and the vibrations of flesh in animate and inanimate things.

Listening to the soundscape, the voice and sonic works, this curatorial performance rethinks current ideas of speculative realism and new materialism via the in-between of things. It suggests that while a ‘masculine new materialism’ insists on the absence of the human to get to the unthought, and thus ultimately proposes the end of philosophy in its own mathematical probability, a ‘sonico-feminine new materialism’ brings us through the creative performance of matter and language to the seemingly unthinkable, to reperform it not in words but on the body and on things: doing, digging, gardening as a revocalization and rephysicalization of theory through its interbeing with things.