Channels of Testimony: An Evening of Artistic Mediations of Listening

Channels of Testimony brings together the outcomes of three creative research projects funded by a Seed Fund grant from the Acts of Listening Lab/COHDS. This public event invites audiences into an evening of performance, reflection, and exchange exploring how artistic practices can transform the ways we listen to lived experience, testimony, memory, and embodied knowledge.

The evening features three distinct projects that engage listening through performance, storytelling, sensory experience, and speculative narration.

Sentir la Luz / Sense the Light by T Braun and Franklin Bonivento van Grieken, with Kim Sawchuk, Kara Paul, and Teatro Ciego, investigates how digital mediation, virtual reality, sound, and light reshape perception and listening among people with visual impairment.

Sucúa Haven Lab by Vanesa Terán and María Fernanda del Real is inspired by Sucúa Haven, a collection of migration stories created with Ecuadorians in Connecticut (United States), members of the Latin diaspora in Montreal (Canada), and Ecuadorians and other Latin American immigrants in Quito (Ecuador). Through this project, participants reflect on their own migratory experiences and create performances of embodied testimonies that place the stories of Sucúa Haven in dialogue with their own.

Cucumbers, The Melancholy of a Turtle and a Girl’s Otaku’s Romance by Peng Hsu is a research-creation project that uses fictional narrative to explore practices of witnessing lives and the ways they are lived through Broke Broke Recitation (BBR). A phrase commonly used in Taiwan and China to describe women’s ongoing talk about daily and seemingly banal trivialities, BBR is reimagined here as a technique of queer narration for speaking around subjects when direct language is unavailable.

Join us for an evening of live works, shared inquiry, and artistic experimentation.