Carmen Pardo Salgado. Workshop around attention and imagination

The cycle Presentes densos. Around the arts of living on a damaged planet, began in September 2020 and is curated by Miguel Ángel Martínez. The title of the cycle comes from an expression by Donna J. Haraway, who in her latest book, Staying with the Trouble, talks about the contemporary era as a “dense present”. As Haraway, this project invites us to become capable of giving a responsible and perhaps partial response to the challenges and horrors of the Anthropocene. For that purpose, the project begins with the ecological emergency situation of the Natural Park of l’Albufera de València.

17th session of the cycle. Workshop Around attention and imagination, coordinated by Carmen Pardo Salgado.

The session focuses on our ability to pay attention, and it is developed as a “workshop to learn to listen (also to birdsong)”. It is proposed as a theoretical-practical experience in which an introduction to the learning of listening is carried out. This introduction, which will be developed in three stages, involves a journey through the ways in which attention and imagination are articulated in our listening:

• Time one. About silence and the possibility of listening: it is necessary to lose oneself to begin to listen.
• Time two. If you listen to the world, the ear is filled with sounds. Listening to the silence.
• Time three. To a non-anthropocentric listening: about the vocalizations of humans and birds.

Carmen Pardo Salgado works in the interface between philosophy and sound art. She is a tenured lecturer at the University of Girona and Professor of the Sound Art Master’s degree at the University of Barcelona. As a post-doctoral researcher in the IRCAM-CNRS unit in Paris (1996-1998), she carried out research into the soundscape in contemporary music. She edited and translated Escritos al oído by John Cage (1999) and is the author of En el silencio de la cultura (Sexto Piso, 2016); La escucha oblicua: una invitación a John Cage (Sexto Piso, 2014; Robert Wilson (in collaboration with Miguel Morey, Polígrafa, 2003); Las TIC: una reflexión filosófica (Laertes, 2009); and En el mar de John Cage (La Central, 2009).

Check out the microsite of “Presentes densos”: