Brandon LaBelle | Silent Noises: Meditation on X

Turning attention to the inner dimensions, this performative lecture follows the echoic reverberations spanning across personal lives. Extending from a close reading of Clarice Lispector’s enigmatic work Aqua Viva, Brandon LaBelle carefully attends to his own memories, particularly tracing the story of his great-grandmother and how her experiences as an illiterate immigrant becomes emblematic of a greater social history. Silent Noises moves between the personal and the historical, all the while mobilizing the figure of X as a poetic force of the unnamable. X is not simply a letter or symbol, instead it emerges as a trickster, a turbulence and a connecting thread, animating the disturbed ecologies at the center of contemporary life. By way of following X, LaBelle provides a meditation on states of rupture that are perennially endured, becoming a structure to how material, social journeys are made.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010), and Background Noise (2006).

The event is organised by ArtCollab and Sound, Narrative, Technology (SNT) at Malmö Theatre Academy in collaboration with the Sound Environment Centre and the Division of Musicology and Intermedia Studies.