I crack a nervous joke with two new artist friends from Milan and Tel Aviv while jiggling a long white swab up my nose. Since they’re doing the same thing it’s not a bad icebreaker. It’s my first international trip in 18 months and whilst I feel guilty towards Australia’s perpetual lockdowns such precautions ease my mind.

We’re at the cultural community of Uferhallen, a ramshackle suite of artist studios, low rent cafes and converted buses in Berlin’s district of Wedding. Whilst I sense the site’s more anarchic days have passed (it was recently bought up by an investment group, an increasingly common story here) it still feels very Berlin.

The Listening Academy. Photo © Julian Day

The Listening Academy is a week-long symposium about how something as seemingly commonplace as listening can be a powerful social tool. I join a diverse cohort of artists, scholars and thinkers who focus on listening not as a passive solo act but as “a creative and critical force” to effect meaningful change in the world. Co-founder Brandon LaBelle proposes that it can be “the basis for resistance, healing, creative and ecological engagement”.

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