Presented at the Aperto, project space of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, this installation was conceived as an extension of the exhibition project “Un·Tuning Together: Practising Listening with Pauline Oliveros” which Bétonsalon – centre for art and research is dedicating to the feminist composer Pauline Oliveros, pioneer of electronic music, accordionist and educator. Conceived as a listening and reading station by Konstantinos Kyriakopoulous and Martha Salimbeni, this project explores the links between Deep Listening and ecology through a selection of Oliveros’ archives and works.

According to Pauline Oliveros, “Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening is a heightened state of awareness and connects the listener to all there is.”^¹ This definition emphasises the role the natural world plays in Oliveros’ work — “My childhood in a rural area of Texas sensitized me to sounds of the elements and animal life”, she explained on many occasions — but also and, above all, her understanding of listening as a practice capable of raising our awareness of what connects us to the world.

As the musicologist Denise Von Glahn writes: “Oliveros embraces a holistic worldview and thus conceives of nature differently from many earlier writers, thinkers and composers who understood it as something discrete and outside themselves, something to which one went, something separate from humanity. Oliveros sees herself as part of a living continuum.”^²

Organised into five chapters, this exhibition focuses on the different ways in which, in Oliveros’ work, the practice of listening can help us feel this continuity with the living world. Here, the sensitive experience participates in a political project: that of breaking with an anthropocentric vision of nature by experiencing the environment not as background noise, a setting for human activities, but as an active entity to which we are profoundly connected.

Extending their contributions to the exhibition at Bétonsalon, Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos and Martha Salimbeni create a space for consulting documents that draws inspiration from library devices made of flexible supporting structures. Illuminated by a soft light associated with drowsiness, these memories can be revived by reading, listening, interpreting and daydreaming.