«Listening and Dreaming»
The research project Cinema and Environment 2: Ways of Seeing Beyond the Anthropocene, in collaboration with Suralita invited participants to a night of camping at the rural schools of Manacor to listen speculatively. Developed by researcher Laura Del Vecchio, speculative listening is a practice of attention that opens space for sonic imagination. Rather than seeking to control or interpret, it proposes listening from a place of uncertainty, of wonder — as a way of knowing that neither imposes nor silences, but listens with an open ear and without guarantees.
It was an immersive session where one could hear the sounds of the natural and historic landscape of Llevant; those noises that usually go unnoticed but in fact say much more than they seem.
The aim was simple: to teach how to listen differently — more attentively, more openly, more curiously. This gathering created a space to connect with forms of life and ways of knowing that do not speak as we do, but that also communicate if we know how to pay attention. It became an exercise in presence and imagination, a way of sharing silence and sounds with everything around us that we so often forget.
Objectives
What is being proposed is not a new technique of analysis, but an ethical and perceptual shift: a way of living alongside what we do not fully understand, yet which still affects us. This is where speculative listening also enters into dialogue with Donna Haraway and her proposal of becoming-with. This concept reminds us that knowledge and subjectivity are neither individual nor exclusively human processes, but always emerge from relationships between species, between bodies, between worlds. Becoming-with means recognizing that we are constantly co-constituting ourselves with other forms of life, that there is no “we” prior to the bond, but rather that we are part of a web of interdependencies. In the context of speculative listening, this becoming-with takes shape as a practice that does not aim to fix meanings, but to sustain spaces of cohabitation, affinity, and shared disorientation.
Listening, understood in this way, is not a window into other worlds, but a practice that allows us to touch, feel, and be touched by other forms of intelligence. It does not offer clear answers, but creates conditions for listening to what exceeds us, for living alongside what we cannot fully comprehend. It is in this shared, provisional, and fragile space that we can begin to imagine ways of knowing that do not depend on violence or appropriation, but on care, curiosity, and hospitality.
Date and Place
July 24th 2025
Escoles rurals de Manacor
