Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel
Salomé Voegelin
Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet to deal with contemporary issues, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is engaged in the transversal and transdisciplinary potential of the sonic - to listen across disciplines and processes in order to develop a hybridisation of research where music, arts and humanities skills and methodologies can generate a contemporary response to climate, health and social emergencies.
She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Uncurating Sound [2023]. These books, as well as her numerous articles and papers, applied working and experimentation, develop a critical understanding of music, art and the environment as aesthetic, ecological and social, as well as economic and political milieus, whose relational reality and artistic fiction is made accessible through a “sonic thinking”, understood not as essentialist or an anti-visual mode of engagement, but as multi-sensory and response-able: making us “see” more, and appreciative also of what we might not see.
She is a well-respected scholar who is regularly invited to give keynote addresses and talks: e.g. at WHAT SOUNDS DO, UCPH Copenhagen, 2022, for I am not sitting in a room - urban, political and social resonances, Bauhaus University, 2022, as part of RE: Sound, Aalborg, 2019 and at UNAM, Mexico City, 2018.
As an artistic-researcher she focuses on the possibilities of sound and music for knowledge and pedagogy, and is invested in its scope to re-vision the aesthetic to reveal hidden slices of the real. She works collaboratively and across disciplines on projects that explore digital and analog environments to make us hear the construction of their ecological, political and social design: e.g. Sonic Topologies ETH Zürich, Switzerland with Magda Drozd 2022, at Translating Ambience with Lisa Hall, Melbourne, Australia 2019, with David Mollin as part of The Manifesto of Rural Futurism, Palermo 2018 and Melbourne 2019.
Her work between research and practice, curation and education, has led to invitations to teach and conduct workshops worldwide: e.g. Casino Luxembourg 2022, Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen 2021, Harvard University, Boston 2020, Doctoral School Ghent University 2019.
Voegelin's participatory initiatives and curatorial performances bring music and sound making to a collective and practice-based engagement. Her blog soundwords is the template for a public listening, performing and writing. Most recently it framed the curation of a compilation album, ‘paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song’, launched 2022, with Flaming Pines and an exciting array of international musicians (Siavash Amini, claire rousay, Rie Nakajima, AGF, Arturas Bumšteinas, Rebecca Lennon, Rhodri Davies and KMRU).
Between 2014-2022 she co-convened PoL, Points of Listening, with Mark Peter Wright. A monthly series of events which engaged communal listening and sound making in relation to current issues such as Hearing Diversity, Sonic Pedagogy, Care, Ecology, Gender and Technology. It is currently being regenerated, Post-COVID, and in the face of escalating political, social and climate crises, as a collective and applied design project: Designing a Sonic Planet, taking the invisible and relational as a starting point to employ musical and sonic competencies and knowledge to re-imagine the world.
Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK.
Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel
Writing
She is the author of 4 influential books. Her publications articulate at the intersection between sound, politics, aesthetics, social responsibility and identity, and develop a critical listening to art, music and the everyday acoustic environment via phenomenology and possible world theory.
Salomé Voegelin writes and talks about sound, music and listening, about the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view.
She has published numerous articles, papers, chapters and essays that explore and expand the field of political and aesthetic thinking via a sonic sensibility. She is regularly invited to give talks, performance lectures and presentations that produce a live investigation of her ideas and pursue a novel take on current aesthetic and socio-political tendencies and imaginaries.
The themes and research of her texts and talks are focused on the marginal, the invisible and at times even the inaudible, to challenge normative thinking and develop new and innovative engagements at its boundaries. To agitate this marginality she also practices a textual phonography and writes text scores, soundwords, which serve as a template for a collaborative writing and a participatory engagement in how we listen and what/ who we hear.
Art
Salomé Voegelin's artistic practice develops as plural threads which share a focus on the collective and the participatory, pursued through performative modes of working. A common interest to all her approaches is the aim to get a different view, to shift and reset registers of the real, to syncopate what we think we see and know.
Since 2008 she works collaboratively David Mollin, Mollin+Voegelin, in a practice that employs words, things and sound and exists as performances, installations, texts and sonic pieces.
She also engages in shorter term collaborative working and performing with different artists, (e.g. Kate Carr, Lisa Hall, Cath Clover, Jan Schacher, Daniela Cascella), and between 2014-2021, she co-convened with Mark Peter Wright, Points of Listening, a series of of workshops for practice and practice-based research, activities and discussions. Since 2022 she organises, Desiging a Sonic Planet, a new participatory events series.
Such a participatory working is also staged through her text score/phonographic writing blog soundwords, which presents the template for collective listening, writing, score and music/sound making. Meanwhile her curatorial performances cross practice, curation and theory, to find in their juxtaposition and simultaneity a critical voice and experience of what we do and think.
Research
Salomé Voegelin works with the relational logic of sound to develop new analytical and theoretical approaches to art, politics and the environment. She is invested in aesthetics as an applied epistemology, and employs the necessarily inter- and cross-disciplinary nature of listening to query and expand existing knowledge pathways: to cross-reference different disciplines (e.g. art, music, musicology, literary studies, performance and urban study, social science and science); and to develop new methodologies that can contribute to traditional knowledge chains.
Her research works with music, arts and humanities methods and skills to contribute their scope to pressing contemporary issues and their public discussion. She is invested in re-visioning naturalised knowledge tropes through a focus on the sensorial, opening academic working to the tacit, the embodied and the local and thus to plural knowledges.
She is regularly invited to give keynote addresses, and her link between research and practice, curation and education has led to numerous invitations to teach and workshop worldwide.
Between 2019 and 2022, Voegelin was the PI on an AHRC, UK research council, funded project Listening across Disciplines II, which continued the network award of the same name (2016-17). The project sought to establish listening as broadly applicable and legitimate knowledge tool. Currently its findings are developed through the Sounding Knowledge Network [2022-23 AHRC] as well as through research into the possibility of a sonic-science-culture that can listen to the intersections between Climate and Health.
She is a a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, a founding member of CRiSAP, (centre for Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice), as well as an established PhD supervisor and mentor who is experienced and motivated to support and guide early career researchers across different artistic and theoretical fields.
Currently Salomé Voegelin is the PI of the Sounding Knowledge network, an AHRC UK Research Council, (2022-23) funded project that responds to the visuo-centrism of conventional educational methods and the resulting lack of participative and embodied learning opportunities by investigating the potential of a Sonic Pedagogy that practices sensory and tacit, and therefore plural and inclusive learning possibilities. With Dr. Werner Friedrichs (CoI), and Early Career Researchers Dr Kevin Logan and Dr. Kerstin Meißner, project coordinator Dr. Timothy Smith.
Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel