Brandon LaBelle (US)
Linnaeus Residency Programme, May 2025 - May 2026
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, resulting in a range of artistic presentations and extra-institutional initiatives.
As an artist in residence at the Cultural University, Linnaeus University, Brandon will be running a public seminar series under the title The Pirate Academy addressing the topic of Poetic Knowledge.
With the establishment of artistic, practice-based research methods, art is increasingly understood as a form of knowledge production. As Tom Holert highlights, art today is predominantly viewed as “epistemic activity.” Such a development follows from the prevailing logic underpinning the global knowledge economy and the ways in which information and data function as new forms of power and currency. This seems to invite a number of questions, such as: What do we mean by knowledge production and in what way does a logic of production lead to particular ways of knowing? If art is largely a gesture of epistemic activity, what kind of knowledge does it make possible? And how might artistic methods contribute to movements of epistemic agency and the ongoing need for decolonizing knowledge practices?
The Pirate Academy is organized as a public seminar series aimed at investigating the prevailing logic of knowledge production and in what ways knowledge itself functions as hegemonic. To do so, the notion of poetic knowledge is offered as a potential counter-logic or creative supplement. Stemming from the writings of James S. Taylor, poetic knowledge explicitly works at reclaiming a relation to knowing grounded in the fullness of the senses, lending to what Taylor terms “knowing by way of the inside.” In contrast to traditional ideas of scientific objectivity, and the imperative to analyze, dissect, categorize and instrumentalize, poetic knowledge is profoundly sympathetic, subjective, and defined by love. As the ability to “see the life within the object” (as Robin Wall Kimmerer notes), a poetic way of knowing is suggestive for a link with planetary cosmologies and the “beauty of living things.” Moreover, poetic knowledge follows from the distinction Hannah Arendt makes between “knowing” and “thinking,” where knowing is aligned with the search for truth and thinking instead with poetic wisdom. For Arendt, “the will to know” has become a dominant force within human society, undermining our ability to think freely. As Arendt argues, thinking equates with contemplation and the “uselessness” of art, whereas knowing is utilitarian and directed toward scientific capture as well as ideologies of progress. As Taylor summarizes, “poetry discovers, science proves.”
Following these views, the seminar series will be devoted to exploring understandings of poetics, poetic knowledge, and what will be highlighted as “the will to listen”. The Pirate Academy sets out to bring to life a range of critical perspectives through opening a collective and collaborative space for free thinking. This will include the presentation of particular theoretical views and references through prepared lectures, along with specific artistic and historical examples, as well as invitations to join in gentle material activity related to listening, drawing, walking and sharing. We’ll consider the possibility that poetic thinking may be what is needed today to challenge dominant systems with their related enclosures: to act poetically, as Fred Moten highlights, is to “refuse to be settled.”
Art and Science collaborations in the area of streght - The Core of Welfare
During his residency Brandon LaBelle will lead a workshop on The Listening Effect in collaboration with researchers in Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Sustainable Health as a part of the Rock Your Research Project, inviting to knowledge exchange between artists, researchers, and citizens. Workshops with students in the Nursing programme are being planned for the spring 2026.
”Experiences of listening are fundamental to personal and social wellbeing, from listening to oneself in processes of self-care, to listening to others in support of greater recognition and mutuality. This extends across a range of environments, where listening significantly influences the art of being many. Considering the importance of listening, the workshop will focus on the listening effect: if listening impacts private and public lives, how can we better understand as well as enhance it’s effects? While listening is deeply beneficial, it is also instrumentalized as part of systems of control. Listening heals but it may also harm, suggesting the importance of greater knowledge and concerted engagement. The workshop brings focus to the transformative power of listening, combining theoretical sharing and discussion with practical, embodied activity. We will collect individual experiences, thinking together how listening affects or contributes to research practices, and we will explore ways of listening, that moves us from inner worlds to outer environments.”
Biography
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of artistic presentations and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Brandon LaBelle´s website.
The Listening Biennial website.
Workshop with nursing students March 2026
On 9 March in Kalmar and 13 March in Växjö, around twenty second-year nursing students at each campus participated in a three-hour workshop led by artist Brandon LaBelle, invited as part of the Linnaeus Residency Programme. The students are taking the five‑week course Healthpromotion, where one of the learning objectives is to develop the ability to plan, conduct, and evaluate health‑promoting conversations.
Listening as a professional skill
During the workshop, Brandon LaBelle introduced the students to the importance of listening within their profession—not merely as a conversational technique, but as an active, embodied practice.
Starting from the idea that “what I stand for is what I stand on”, he described how listening begins within the body and expands into a social and physical expression. He spoke about the concepts of the “earth body” and “energy body”—what grounds us and what we project—and described the body itself as a kind of “ear.”
Through concrete examples, such as preparing a dinner party for friends with candles, a set table, and music, he illustrated how the environment shapes people’s ability to feel heard. The workshop concluded with students practicing the art of listening.
Reflections
Teachers Fanny Petersson and Cajsa Andersson, who teach the Healthpromotion course, joined the workshop in Växjö. In Kalmar, teacher Kristina Tryselius participated.
– Brandon highlights the right to be listened to, and that is something I will take with me, says Cajsa Andersson.
– In the course, we work a lot with formulating open questions. Brandon takes listening a step further and connects it to the nurse’s professional role, says Fanny Petersson.
– It’s so interesting to reflect on how we actually listen, and that hearing and listening are not the same thing. I also think about cultural differences – Sweden is more of a listening culture, while in my Palestinian culture we are good at talking, but not always equally good at listening.
The workshop was part of the Linnaeus Residency Programme with Brandon LaBelle, who will return to Linnaeus University in June for additional programme activities.
A warm thank‑you to Brandon LaBelle for inspiring days and engaging encounters with the nursing students in Kalmar and Växjö.
