Essay by Gabriel Fontana, Clara Balaguer, Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes. Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice, MIT Press.

WHAT

Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice combines a handbook, dictionary, and anthology, and gathers artistic and cultural practices that are propositional, collective, and centred on the yearning for a just life-in-common.

HOW

In this essay, cultural worker Clara Balaguer and social designer Gabriel Fontana revisit together their contribution to Training for the Not-Yet series with their workshop QFPCSSBBXOXO. In conversation with curators Jeanne van Heeswijk and Rachael Rakes, they unpack the methods of embodied listening to traumatic, personal, and political memories.

WHY

Composer Pauline Oliveros describes deep listening as a way of “listening in every possible way to everything possible, to hear no matter what you are doing”. The work in this section applies deep listening to social and collective practices, acknowledging that listening is core to mutual understanding, anti-oppression, assembly, and being together otherwise.