Keynote Workshops
The following workshops are an add-on to the conference, and supported by the Hessian Film and Media Academy (hFMA), whom we thank for their generosity.
Participation in these workshops is free of charge. On-site conference attendees and a limited number of students from the hFMA network may register. Participation from remote (via video conference or similar means) is not possible.
Conference attendees may register on-site at the conference’s registration desk. Students from the hFMA network will receive separate registration access details.
As our schedule is not yet finalized, changes esp. of timing may apply. Please go to our Program page to download the schedule.
Avan-Nomayo Ikponmwosa (Frankfurt, Germany/Abuja, Nigeria)
Cities That Speak
A participatory exploration of acoustic infrastructures and the social life of sound in African urban cultures
This workshop examines African urban sound cultures as acoustic infrastructures that organize social life. Drawing on Nigerian examples, it engages listening practices, communication systems and embodied cultural knowledge, while addressing the documentation of transitional soundscapes. It attends to trade signatures, signal instruments and communal rhythms, the mobile tailor’s scissors, the town crier’s agogo, the knife sharpener’s bell, okada horn codes, the mortar and pestle through which Nigerian cities transmit shared urban literacies. Read as endangered intangible heritage, these vanishing sonic forms raise questions about archival ethics, listening as situated knowledge, and the responsibilities acoustic ecology bears toward the soundworlds receding from African cities.
Ikponmwosa Avan-Nomayo is a Nigerian curator, researcher and adjunct lecturer at Hochschule Darmstadt. His work engages curatorial practice, urban cultures and questions of documentation, with current research on African sound cultures and the politics of listening, how acoustic environments shape memory, public life and infrastructural imagination across West African cities.
Hildegard Westerkamp (Vancouver, Canada)
The Transformational Nature of Listening
The Gift That It Is
Can listening change us? Can listening make changes in this world? It’s the love for listening that I want to share with you. How it can be a gift of a lifetime, a journey full of surprises, challenges and teachings. How it can open doors to the unknown, to new ideas and experiences. How it can foster community, action and creative energy. Let’s together explore and reflect on our listening processes and how the principles of acoustic ecology and soundscape listening can be applied in our professional and personal realms. I’ll offer up my own life story – which is what I know best – with its soundwalks, field recordings, sonic installations, writings, soundscape compositions, as a place of departure for you, the next generations of soundscape listeners and creators, for new inspirations, cutting-edge actions, ideas, and engagements with this world as it is now.
Hildegard Westerkamp is a prolific sound activist, composer, and soundscape educator. Her compositions and written work are known in many parts of the world. With her expert ear carefully attuned to the world around her, Westerkamp has become a household name for pioneering soundscape composition and the practice of “soundwalking”. In 2024 she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree, honoris causa, from Simon Fraser University.