Symbiotic Resonances

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Elitza Koeva for a reflection on sound practices and listening as tools for exploring more-than-human worlds, as well as their implications for ecological responsibility and contemporary forms of coexistence.

The project

"In the shadow of the Anthropocene – an era defined by ecological crisis, accelerating species loss, and planetary precarity – this talk foregrounds the transformative capacities of sound and critical listening as modes of engaging the animacy and agency of living matter. Moving beyond ocularcentric paradigms and the disembodied objectivity inherited from Enlightenment science, the presentation advocates for an "acoustemological" approach (Feld) that treats sound as a vibratory, relational medium, uniquely sensitive to the presence and alterity of more-than-human worlds. Drawing on new materialist, posthumanist, and sympoietic thought – including the works of Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers – the talk demonstrates how sonic practices, in both scientific and artistic contexts, destabilize entrenched binaries of subject/object, nature/culture, and human/nonhuman. By cultivating modes of attunement, listening emerges as a critical practice for reconfiguring agency, expanding ecological responsibility, and imagining new forms of coexistence in a time of environmental uncertainty."

Speaker

Elitza Koeva holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. Her research examines the relationship among sound, place, and “cross-species sociality” (Haraway) to conceptualize space, intersubjectivity, and the sensorium within the framework of the human-animal-machine cybernetic triangle. Her artistic practice explores how artistic visual, sonic, and spatial practices engender engagement, critical awareness, and participatory responses to digitally mediated environments, reconciling the self and the social at the level of city construction and subjectivity. She is currently a visiting scholar at Sorbonne Université VALE: Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique (UR 4085). Her work has been supported by the Japanese Monbukagakusho Scholarship, Fulbright, Thanks to Scandinavia, ETH research fellowship, Harvard ArtLab, and Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, among others.