This season of the SMP Reading Listening Group shifts from reading to listening, reclaiming the ear as a site for political resistance, solidarity, and attention.
Over four sessions, we’ll journey through world-making narratives, contested soundscapes, and the hidden histories kept alive in sound—crafting a shared practice of radical listening and towards asking a crucial question for our time: what is our agency as the one who listens?
Last season, the SMP Reading Group explored magical realism as a way to think, act, and imagine politically. We moved through stories of imagination, memory, and power, crafting a shared space for reflection and collective exploration.
This season, we carry that same inquiry forward but shift our primary sense: from the eye to the ear. If last season was about the power of the written story, this season turns to the visceral, event-like power of the spoken word and the political act of listening.
Our First Session: The World as Word
Our first listening session puts this new practice into motion. We begin with the quiet politics of the plants in our streets, using them as an anchor to investigate a fundamental fracture in our shared reality: the gap between what we see and the words we have for it. From there, we will listen to a constellation of voices—from theorists to poets—to explore the spoken word not as a label, but as an event: a force with the power to create, control, and (re-)enchant our world.
Date: Tuesday, 16th September 2025
Location: artists-Commons – message for the address - eszter.nemethi(at)pm(dot)me
Time: 18h-21h