Bøger af Brandon Labelle

The accompanying reader for an international biennial on the importance of listeningThis anthology is published for the 2023 Listening Biennial, taking place across the globe from Taipei to Istanbul. It includes contributions from artists and scholars reflecting on the importance of listening as a tool for understanding, healing and transforming in our current political, social and environmental climate.

On the radical power of expansive sympathy and communal careThis anthology gathers essays and conversations on the politics of communal care, making the case for applying an expansive outlook to the practice of human sympathy and advocating a system of interdependence that extends beyond immediate social and familial circles.

The party as a model for new forms of togetherness, with examples from communist Hungary and SpainFrom social get-together to scenes of delirium, this publication aims to unpack the party as a complex, vertiginous construct that provides a dynamic view onto questions of community. If the party functions as an intensification of togetherness, what lessons might it provide in negotiating a given social order? This first volume on the topic considers the house party, and in what ways domestic space is reworked in support of an extension of the family unit. Including a series of interviews with those active in flat events in Budapest during the communist regime and today, essays on hospitality, the politics of rest, and erotic knowledge, and documentation on Sala 603, an informal house-theater in Curitiba. The publication is the first in a new Errant Bodies series developed in parallel to a set of party-workshops initiated by the artist Brandon LaBelle held in different locations in Madrid, each of which performatively investigates states of partying, posing the party as a scene of study.

Volume two in Errant Bodies' new series on transcultural poetics: struggles and utopian desires of contemporary lifeThe Other Citizen tracks the hopes and losses, struggles and utopian desires of what the author terms "the floating subjects" of contemporary life. Drawing upon traditions of socially engaged poetics, the work takes aim at the heart of contemporary crisis and exclusionary politics, mobilizing instead the creative solidarities and pirate imaginaries spanning the globe. Through ten acts we are led into narratives of friendship and survival, threadbare endurance and tender resistance.From lost teenagers struggling in the American maze of neoliberal privatization to secret gatherings of artistic bandits occupying buildings in Madrid to those caught in between the borders of nation-states, these emerge as frontiers of invention that, when stitched together, outline the force of an anarchic citizenry. The Other Citizen is a challenging and moving call for exiting the new norm of crisis.

Performance artists address the political possibilities of creative agencyThe Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice and political subjectivity. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Richard Gilman-Opalsky terms "imaginary power."The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Gerald Raunig, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler and Manuela Zechner.

Recent Chilean artists explore the power of art as a platform for working through confining political structuresThis book engages the creative and critical strategies at play in works of recent Chilean art that emerge from a reflection on the politics of invisibility: how the operations of the seen and the unseen are understood to perform equally within the material realities of Chilean society. Stemming from two exhibitions and seminars held in Bergen, Norway and Santiago de Chile, curated and organized by Soledad García Saavedra and Brandon LaBelle, Magic Block underscores the processes of appearance and disappearance, memory and forgetting, writing and erasure as social and psychological intensities. Through the works of Chilean artists and writers, the publication highlights art as a powerful platform for working through the political structures that hold the body in a phantasmic grip, and which can be traced and appropriated through unsteady acts of magic. Expressions of secrecy, camouflage, forgetfulness, dematerialization and covert occupation thus enable a giving narrative to those memories that are often subordinated by history. The book includes works by Catalina Bauer, Juan Downey, Claudia Missana, Eugenio Téllez, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Michelle-Marie Letelier, Rainer Krause, Gonzalo Díaz/Justo Pastor Mellado Voluspa Jarpa and Enrique Ramírez.

"Writing comes up from under my skin," writes Brandon LaBelle. "It creeps into my sleep, to tense my fingers; I am plunged into it, as a space for capturing a new voice, for figuring a new body: to take an empty page and to fill it, with the day to day." LaBelle's work as an artist and theorist focuses on the interrelation between the sonic arts, popular culture and theory, using mainly site-specific sound performances. The second volume in Errant Bodies' Doormats series Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is LaBelle's attempt to engage the events of the Arab Spring through the diary form, in which personal memories are conjoined with broader cultural reflections on American imperialism and revolution. Written between February and June of 2011, Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is an attempt to outline what LaBelle calls "an agency of the intimate."

Room Tone was initiated by artist Brandon LaBelle to examine the relationship between sound and architecture. LaBelle sent field recordings of his apartment to 20 architects, designers and artists, each of whom was invited to construct a physical model of the apartment based solely on these recordings. This publication includes documentation of the architectural renderings, essays, an interview with LaBelle and a CD of the recordings.

Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren (born 1950) is one of the most constantly innovative conceptual artists working in the combined fields of audio and video. A writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer, he has numerous audio releases to his credit; this DVD-booklet supplies an important overview of his work.

Writing against confinement and uncertainty: LaBelle reflects on lockdownArticulated in the form of 100 short poetic entries, Dreamtime X is a diary written between March 2020 and March 2021, capturing the conditions of the lockdown as experienced by Berlin-based artist, musician and writer Brandon LaBelle (born 1969).

A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change.In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative "unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the "space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival.By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them.