Danae Stefanou, Associate Professor, School of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Eva Matsigkou, Phd Candidate, School of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki & ERC-MUTE Research Fellow, National Hellenic Research Foundation
listening ethics, autoethnography, sound studies, sonic fiction
Discussing educational, performative and fictive practices emerging from the university undercommons (Harney & Moten 2013), we attempt a situated, dialogical reflection on practices of listening-together and sounding-together in brokenness, dispossession and displacement. How are communities formed and sustained against a backdrop of perpetual sociopolitical and economic crisis? How is personal and collective trauma shared and processed within failing cultural & educational infrastructures? What kinds of spaces emerge by attending to ephemeral or liminal sonic encounters between differently affected voices? How are these spaces held and witnessed?
References
Danae Stefanou (photo: Dimitris Parthimos)
Danae Stefanou is Associate Professor at the School of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) where she also leads the Experimental & Improvised Music Ensembles (σ.π.Α.Μ.*) and several other informal groups for practice-based research (Critical Music Histories, noise:muse etc.). Her research explores experimental & improvised music histories, sound environments and critical listening practices, often through a combination of artistic, ethnographic, archival, theoretical & analytical methods. She has contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Film Music (CUP, 2016), Made in Greece: Studies in Greek Popular Music (Routledge, 2018), Contemporary Popular Music Studies (Springer, 2019) and Music and Landscape / Soundscape and Sonic Arts (Universal Edition, 2019) and has written, edited and contributed to several text score projects, such as the Multimodal Community Composition Project Athens (2022). In recent years, her work combines text scores, ephemeral poetry and sonic fiction with original participatory and performative methodologies, aiming at a constant renegotiation of boundaries between subjects and objects, identity and otherness, agency and circumstance.
Eva Matsigkou (photo: garconnocturne)
Eva Matsigkou is a PhD candidate at the School of Music Studies, AUTH and a doctoral research fellow at the ERC MUTE at the National Hellenic Research Foundation. Her research examines the notion of listening through interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from music and sound studies, oral and sensory history, and ethnography. She develops historiographical approaches using artistic, performative, and participatory processes, applying feminist and queer methodologies to reflect on the ways we document stories and experiences.
As an artist, she creates intermedia work that begins with sound but also extends into performance, writing, and video. She coordinates listening-based workshops and has contributed extensively to the documentation of contemporary sound art practices, notably in collaboration with Syros Sound Meetings. A founding member of the feminist performance duo I broke the vase, active for the past six years, she has been a resident artist at Syros Sound Meetings, Vovousa Festival, and the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at the University of Michigan. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Critical Music Histories (CMH) study group.