Brandon LaBelle: On Poetic Knowledge

Artist, writer and theorist Brandon LaBelle is a guest at the Angewandte at the invitation of the Deparments of Media Theory and KKP, dedicates this workshop to approaching a poetic way in teaching and research:

Poetic knowledge is posed as a framework for elaborating creative methodologies and research practices attuned to holistic futures. In tension with dominant knowledge economies, and the obligation to work at forms of production as artists and researchers, we’ll explore poetics and poetic knowledge as sympathetic forms which open onto restoring connections across human and more-than-human worlds.

By grounding us in our bodies and environments, as well as through supporting forms of “cosmic connection”, poetic knowledge emerges as a “grammar of animacy” which, as Robin Wall Kimmerer argues, is key to becoming indigenous to place. To elaborate our understanding of poetic forms of knowledge, we’ll also consider in what ways listening participates; as Kimmerer highlights, it is imperative that we learn to listen to the plants, the winds, the waters, so as to restore forms of ecological relations, becoming what indigenous activist Ailton Krenak further calls a “planetary citizen”. Moving between poetic knowledge and listening practices, we’ll work at finding ways of instituting a poetic approach to our teaching and research practices, to ultimately map a cosmic sense of life.

LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019–23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017–), The Living School (2014–16), The Imaginary Republic (2014–19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013–22), Surface Tension (2003–2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998–2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).