We are collaborating with the Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Paralax. This event is organised by the Portuguese research center CIUHCT and its project Anthropolands and it takes place at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal, between 6 and 11 January 2020. This Campus is part of the Anthropocene Curriculum initiated by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), which has generated two Anthropocene Campus in Berlin (2014, 2016) and several satellite events worldwide.
We will be co-convening and organising one of the seminars under the title «The Sonic Ecology of the Tourist City».
Although the Anthropocene is largely represented through graphs, maps and vivid images of environmental disasters, its global changes are equally present in how a place sounds and the way it shapes the possibilities for listening and sounding of situated people and other living beings. From the hums and sonic bursts of deep sea mining to the prospect of silent springs to come, by way of the trolley rattling and engineered-for-authenticity sonic ambiances of the tourist city, listening to Anthropocene topologies invites new reflections on scale, presence, permanence, agency and the experience and politics underlying this proposed epoch.
The seminar invites participants to reflect on these concerns by way of a situated case: the touristification of Lisbon. Recent scholarship has scrutinized the anthropocenic force of mass tourism around issues of sustainability, environmental ethics, power relations, and/or mobility. As Lisbon becomes an increasingly popular tourist destination, these issues are embedded within the city’s shifting sonic ambiances. Through a combination of theory and practice, this seminar will explore the sonic impacts of touristification in Lisbon and ask how the sonic ecology of cities affected by mass tourism can help us sense and reflect on the interplay of global eco-sociological changes turned into local issues and vice-versa.
The seminar included a guest lecture by Brandon Labelle.
