Wednesday 16th April, 6.00-8.00pm

Void Art Centre

 

Join Void Art Centre and Elena Lespes Muñoz, Head of Public Outreach at Bétsonsalon, for an experimental reading group as part of the curator’s visit to Derry next week.

The reading group will take the form of an arpentage, a term that comes from the lexical field of land surveying, usually referring to the measurement of a plot of land’s surface area For this reading group, Elena will approach arpentage as a collective form of reading that originated in 19th century workers’ circles, involving cutting the book (yes, really!), distributing sections to be read individually before a collective discussion. The excerpts from different readers help to create connections, clarify what was unclear in another’s passage—almost like conducting an investigation together.

For this session, we will read the text ‘Uneasy Listening: Notes on Hearing and Being Heard’ by Anouchka Goose and Robert Brewer Young which asks: What makes a good listener? Is it a skill one can easily learn or more of a quirk or talent? And why do some people seem to be so much better at it than others?

Written by a psychoanalyst and a violin maker, Uneasy Listening is a dialogue between two very different kinds of professional listener: the former working with speech, the latter with musical instruments. The result is a kind of awkward duet in which two thinkers and practitioners accommodate, interrupt, and perplex each other in an attempt to say something about what listening means.

 

Elena Lespes Muñoz Biography

Elena is an art historian and curator. After a field research in South America, during which she conducted interviews with art historians and artists on “conceptualisms”, she carried out PhD research on the history of exhibitions at the University of São Paulo’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP) during the 1970s. She worked as a project coordinator in contemporary art at KADIST (Paris), Artesur (dedicated to contemporary art from Latin America) and at the Aline Vidal gallery. At the same time, she has conceived and accompanied projects as curator for Bétonsalon, CAC Brétigny, Salle Principale, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France) and Frac Sud (Marseille, France). After working at CAC Brétigny, she joined the Bétonsalon team as Head of public outreach in 2022. She has contributed to various art reviews, such as Zérodeux, Switch on paper, Insert and Marges and contributed for several artist’s books and exhibition catalogs. She teaches at University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis.