Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention

We cordially invite you to join us in listening to ruins. Over two years, an international group of artists, thinkers, musicians, and scholars turned the former Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds into an experiment in listening. The goal was to listen to history and open new artistic perspectives through performative perception, field recordings and sound walks, installations, and written texts.

A famous field recordist once said, “events haunt spaces.” Another way of saying this is that history contaminates place, hence the focus here on spaces that have been impacted if not defined by historical trauma. Such spaces tend to be overdetermined by their histories. That field recordist’s insight also reminds us that listeners are already contaminated by the histories, associations, and meanings of a particular location, and so the chosen spaces are not assumed to be neutral. In encouraging history to bleed into present listening we allow space to speak.

​​This group includes writer/scholar Louis Chude-Sokei, artist/musician Jan St. Werner, singer/activist Hani Mojtahedy, scholar/violinist Gascia Ouzounian, artists MendiandKeith Obadike, Michael Akstaller and Yara Mekawei.