Research Club, Listening as a Research Method I,
Wednesday 15 March, 17:00-19:00, Basement KABK
Special guest: London-based artist Mo’min Swaitat (Palestinian Sound Archive)
Everyone is warmly invited to attend our first KABK Research Club of 2023. The session will be devoted to sharing art and design research practices that gather around the uses, methods and meanings of listening.
In part 1, our special guest Mo’min Swaitat will introduce us to his Palestinian Sound Archive project where listening is deployed, with sonic archiving, to preserve and protect cultural heritage.
In part 2, we will leave time for all those who want to ‘pitch’ an idea for the for our upcoming publication and/or exhibition, Listening as a Research Method in Art and Design. Please select 1 image, 1 sound file and prepare a pitch no longer than 5 minutes. Please note that we are not expecting finalized submissions or projects! If you have questions please let us know!
Mo’min Swaitat is the founder of Majazz Project: the first Palestinian-led record label and research platform of its kind, focused on sampling, remixing and reissuing vintage cassettes and vinyl from the Arab world and Africa. The collection spans field recordings of Bedouin weddings to synth-heavy 80s funk and jazz.
In 2020, during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in Palestine, Swaitat discovered a large collection of cassette tapes and records from his youth in Jenin. Amongst them was Riad Awwad’s Intifada, the first album released in the first Intifada, containing revolutionary songs. It had been lost for years after the Israeli army confiscated all the copies they could find – 3,000 in all – and arrested Awwad.
Inspired, Swaitat founded the Majazz Project record label and Palestine Sound Archive radio show on NTS Radio, a celebration of music, film, spoken word and album artwork from historic Palestine, mainly from the 1960s-1990s.
The KABK Research Club is an informal forum for tutors, heads, staff, workshop supervisors, PhD candidates and students. Research can take the form of scholarly investigation into art or design as subject matter, or it can be practice-led, using art or design as the method and means of enquiry. Club meetings are organized several times a year and convened by the Design Lector, Dr Alice Twemlow. During club meetings, participants are invited to share their research in progress and engage in discussion about shared points of interest in research such as methods, approaches and references as well as in practical matters such as the funding, organisation, publishing and dissemination of research. The aim is to identify and nurture emergent and developing research projects, share findings and best practices and create a network of potential collaborators and mentors.
KABK Design Lectorate Art & Design Practices
Do you work with listening as an approach in your research practice?
Consider submitting a short description of your research focus and some images and/or links.
And/or pitch your listening research practice in person at the Research Club meeting on Wednesday 15 March, 17:00-19:00 with a 1-image + 1-sound-file presentation.
If you've already submitted an idea, be assured it is logged; this live pitching event is an optional extra!
Expressions of interest due by 15 March
📢 Open to students, PhD candidates, tutors, professors, alumni, and anyone in the KABK-KC-Leiden University research community!
🙊 The Design Lectorate is starting work on a new edition in the KABK Art & Design Research Practices series. With this initiative, we identify and share research methods practiced at KABK that use the tools, approaches, and capacities of art and design to create and surface new knowledge. After exploring how walking and touching are used as research methods, we now turn to listening.
🎧 Whether your practice is in art, design, sonology, performance, theory, or a combination thereof…
🐚 Whether you engage with listening literally or figuratively, poetically or politically, directly or via technology, in real time or as a recording, individually or communally…
🐦 Whether the listening feeds into your research or is a means of sharing insights with others…
🔔 Whether you are interested in the spaces of listening, the modes and media of listening, the distinctions between sound, music, noise, voice and silence…
🦻🏽 Whether you work with radio, spoken word, podcasting, interviewing, sound composition, surveillance, field recording, sound walks…
📞 …we’d love to hear from you!
📻 If you have something to submit for our publication, exhibition, or online repository, go right ahead or if you just want to let us know you are exploring listening in your work, that’s also fine.
🎛 Submissions can be in any format you think appropriate for a publication or online repository, including but not limited to:
* final results of a research project (images, sound files, diagrams, excerpts of text etc.)
* notes and reflections on the research process
* curricula, teaching assignments or syllabi
* visual essays or sonic essays
* excerpts from research journals
* prompts and cues for sound walks and listening exercises
* interviews/ Q&As
