Dr Salome Voegelin

Biography

Salomé Voegelin is an artist, writer and researcher engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. She pursues sound studies as a transversal study able to deal with the complex interdependencies of a connected world. Her essays and text-scores are written for performance and publication. Books include Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21). Her most recent book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (2023) foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment’s desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.

Voegelin’s work brings the philosophy of sound to a participatory engagement. She is deeply invested in the benefits of a Sonic Pedagogy: sound enabling situated, plural and embodied learning and teaching opportunities. Between 2014 and 2022 she co-convened Points of Listening with Mark Peter Wright. This monthly series of events engaged in collective listening and communal sound making and informs her present series of collective actions Designing a Sonic Planet which takes the invisible and relational as a starting point to employ musical and sonic sensibilities to re-imagine the world from its indivisibility, testing the possibilities of sound’s relationality for environmental science and philosophy. As an artist Voegelin works collaboratively with David Mollin, Mollin+Voegelin, in a practice that engages words, things and sound and focuses on invisible connections, transient behaviour and unseen rituals.

As a curator she is particularly interested in collective and participatory approaches. Her most recent projects Cassette Album and paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song, both with Flaming Pines, both involved the collaboration with musicians, performers and composers via the medium of text scores and tape sculptures.

Voegelin is a Professor of Sound art the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. She was the PI (principle investigator) of Listening across DisciplinesII, LxDII, a research project that systematically investigated the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities, science, social science and technology, and leads the Sounding Knowledge Network, which conducts a multidisciplinary investigation of auditory teaching and learning. Both projects were funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), UK.


www.salomevoegelin.net,
www.listeningacrossdisciplines.net,
www.soundwords.tumblr.com, @soundwords_sv