Listening in 'Slug Time'

This audio paper takes place in the garden, a space of refuge and multispecies co-dependence, from the perspective of two people living with disabling conditions.

We are a sound artist and an anthropologist, also mother and daughter. We are both adjusting to alternative temporalities, reduced mobilities and ways of living by our chronically unwell bodies. Our paper meditates on how multispecies listening can help us to live slower and maybe better, embrace new temporalities and sustain practices of care within the garden and beyond.

We have been developing sound sitting, as opposed to sound walking, as an accessible listening practice. Sound sitting invites slow listening,” in every possible way to everything possible to hear” (Oliveros, 1998). attending to the small, mundane, and everyday sonic worlds within and between bodies - our own and the critters of the garden that we ignore or treat carelessly under capitalism. Inspired by crip time (Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2017), anthropology (Tsing, 2021) and expanded listening practices (Oliveros,1995; Shah, 2021), we become participants in a sonic network that extends to the semantic and the ethical allowing us to listen and learn from more than human temporalities- ‘slug time’ or the amorphous, sticky instances of slow knowledge production.