Errant Listeninga practice of archiving the heartFatima Lahham and Lee-Shan Tse

The fourth instalment of Errant Listening takes the form of an intimate, participatory workshop exploring the transformative potential of repetition through collective sounding, listening and writing. Drawing inspiration from the Islamic devotional practice of dhikr - the remembrance of Allah through the repetition of divine names and phrases - geographer and musician Fatima Lahham and anthropologist and calligrapher Lee-Shan Tse invite participants to encounter its resonances through sonic, embodied and calligraphic practices: through breath and brush, mediated by the ear.

Taking its title from what poet lisa luxx calls ‘a practice of archiving the heart’, the workshop engages with that which cannot be materially traced or preserved through physical modes of archiving. How does the ear archive what the heart hears? How might repetition transform us through the shared acts of sounding, listening and writing?

Participants will be invited into a slow practice of repetition. They will choose a word or sound of personal significance, giving voice to it repeatedly and writing it with water and brush. The gesture of writing with water echoes sound’s ephemerality and its absence of a lasting material trace: while wet, the words remain legible for a brief time, just as voices remain present while they are sounding. But when the sound has faded and the water has dried, who remembers what happened? How do we hold the memories and realities we experience through a heart-led approach that creates an alternative, errant archive?

Free entry, limited capacity, booking essential

Light refreshments will be provided.

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Errant Listening is an experimental, open-ended programme series that attends to the sonic dimensions of contemporary artistic practice, documentation, and curation. The series explores how sound wanders, unsettles, and exceeds the structures that seek to contain it. By focusing on the un/archivable – the sounds and vibrations that slip away, withdraw, or refuse legibility – and foregrounding the sonic agency embedded within these activities and gatherings, the series proposes ways of understanding the archive not as preservation, but as attunement, and listening not as perception, but as transformation.

Errant Listening is curated by Jiaying Kou, Publications and Programmes Lead.