Mélia Roger: intangible otherness

A lecture-performance about listening through touch
Duration: 30 min

Free entrance. 

Limited places: please pre-register HERE.

With microphones attached to her hands and listening to the amplified touch through headphones, Mélia Roger explores hidden and unheard layers of the landscape. She strokes, touches and feels the roughness of surfaces and carefully listens to the sounds that her touch produces. Inspired by the notion of “in-between”, developed by the sound artist and researcher Salomé Voegelin, the sonic textures created with this technique highlight relations normally existing in void and silence, without any touch.

The point of connection, seemingly a sonic friction, can be explored with care and tenderness, questioning the consent of others – as if the microphones were activating the troubled layer between her hands and the non-human surface. Trying to shift away from an anthropocentric listening position, Mélia Roger offers the term ‘eco-empathic listening’ to address the act of carefully listening to non-human and more-than-human beings: listening to her touching of barks, rocks and leaves, she offers an embodied way to listen to others.¨

Thanks to SEAS and House of Foundation.