With the participation of Leah Bassel, Nina Emge, Mort Drew, Loré Lixenberg, Roberta Miss, Nele Möller, Sharon Stewart et Karen Willems

The Goethe-Institut Brussels, La Loge Brussels, and artist Nele Möller present Listening Other·Wise, a 24-h public programme about listening which takes place at La Loge on December 12 and 13, 2025.

Bringing together sound and vocal performances, audio streams, reading sessions, deep listening exercises, DJ sets, and lecture performances, the event unfolds as an exploration of listening in its many forms. It moves through sounding ecologies and the politics of sound, attending to the ways in which listening can unsettle, connect, and reimagine our relations with one another and the world. It seeks to question and reflect on listening as a practice with emancipatory potential – one that opens up new sorts of relations and collective experiences.

The event is based on Nele Möller's project, The Forest Echoes Back – an ongoing live audio broadcast from a site in the Thuringian Forest in Germany, which was recently cut down by forest management to stop the spread of the bark beetle. The audio stream was installed in the summer of 2023 to transmit the changing acoustic environment of this forest, which is slowly disappearing due to monoculture plantings, human-made climate change, and bark beetle outbreaks. For Listening Other·Wise, Möller further develops and expands the concept of collective, slow, and long-durational listening to explore questions of simultaneities and entanglements of different places. Central to the concept are the relationships between various states of consciousness and how they influence our listening response-abilities.

In addition to the Forest stream, Möller has selected various projects and Locus Sonus audio streams from specific sites, which will sometimes be mixed together. They draw on an immersive soundscape in which the audience is invited to sit, lie down, and/or sleep during the night, until the awakening sound session in the morning. Over the course of the event, other invited guest-participants will attune themselves to the selected live audio streams transmitted. Each will offer a unique response, informed by their own ways of conceiving listening – as a practice, method, or mode of relation.

By approaching listening as a polyphonic form of sharing and relationality (as described by Rolando Vázquez) and a co-constitutive process that shapes our interdependence with human and more-than-human bodies, the event calls for a shift of attention. It invites us to focus not on listening as an isolated act, but on the relations, responsibilities, and forms of reciprocity it generates. Listening thus becomes a political gesture: a way to reconfigure how we inhabit the world together, how we acknowledge voices, and how we resist hegemonic ways of knowing and speaking.

The event is part of the trans-regional project on the topic of listening that the European Goethe- Instituts will be implementing in 2026 and 2027.

Practical information

Friday, December 12th
Doors open at 20:00
Free access and events until 01:00am
Sleeping time on spot, on the sound of the audio stream, upon reservation.
Book here for the sleeping time
No access possible during the sleeping time.

Saturday December 13th
The doors will open again on Saturday morning for the awakening session around 7:30am.
Free access and free breakfast
Events until 11am
Ongoing audio-stream from 11:30 until 14:00
Afternoon session: 14:00-17:00

Full programme here

Venue
La Loge, Brussels
Rue de l’ermitage 86, 1050 Ixelles
www.la-loge.be
Visit the website for more information about the programme and access.

Contact
info@la-loge.be