Masterclass by Eszter Némethi

“To listen is to give audience — to allow something to act in the world.” (notes from School of Magical Politics Listening Group)
 

Listening is often described as receptive or passive, yet every act of listening is also a decision: what to attend to, what to ignore, what to let resonate. In political life as in art, listening defines the field of what can be heard, remembered, and made real.

Through two masterclasses at BNA-BBOT and a winter school at GC DeRinck we will explore together the agency of the listener and protocols for political listening.

In this first session, Eszter Némethi introduces the idea of listening protocols: guided, collective exercises that reveal the many ways listening can act, respond, and compose. Through a short lecture and a series of practical experiments, the class explores the politics and poetics of listening — from the body as a site of attention to the listener as a public actor.

Pratical Informations :

18th December 2025 

18:00- 21:00 at BNA-BBOT (119 rue de Laeken 1000 Bruxelles)

Language : EN

Fee : 15 euros

Inscriptions by info@bna-bbot.be  

A second session in February 2026 will continue this exploration, building on the findings of the Listening Field winter school and co-hosted with artist Julia E. Dyck.

The Listening Field is a three day winter school hosted by Eszter Nemethi and Julia E. Dyck in collaboration with BNA-BBOT and GC DeRinck and will result in a radio broadcast as part of SON.OOR on the 31st January 2026.

Eszter Némethi is a Hungarian theatre maker and researcher based in Brussels. Her work explores the interplay between language, listening and political imagination, often through participatory formats that create space for quiet and polyphonic expression. She leads the long-running initiative School of Magical Politics and in 25/26 the research cycle Geology of the Real, which focuses on memory, recall and the ethics of listening in performance. She graduated from a.pass and her work has been presented in Ireland, Belgium and internationally.

Julia E. Dyck is a Canadian artist and hypnotherapist living in Brussels. She works with sound, performance and expanded states of consciousness, exploring listening as an instrument for collective transformation. In her practice, she uses voice, vibrations and stories to open porous boundaries between body, technology and the subconscious. Her recent projects relate to queer ecologies and psychoacoustics.

Photo: Lower Levant Company (LLC) installation, “when the ear tells the eye where to look” 2023 photographed by Julia E. Dyck

Antje Van Wichelen is the BNA-BBOT artist in residence until the end of 2025. She brings with her the Troubled Archives (TA) collective as her curatorial team.

Antje explores experimental methods of collaboration between nature and 16mm film emulsion. She engages with people from different backgrounds in dialogue, togetherness and meditation. Since 2010, she has been investigating the collective trauma of colonial classification by translating archival photographs onto 16mm film, effectively putting the archives to work.

Troubled Archives is a collective of artists and researchers who critically engage with colonial photographic archives. The collective seeks ways to re-dignify the individuals depicted in these colonial photographs and examine their potential resonance today. They are currently developing experimental research methods, inspired by the work of Ariella Aïcha Azoulay (Potential History), Tina Campt (Listening to Images), and Resmaa Menakem, who explores how we can address and heal the "dirty pain" that affects our society—a challenge for each of us. The research involves exploring the (colonial) photographic context, imagining its sound in the archive, and reflecting on how we can heal relationships distorted by historical inequalities that persist today.

The long-term project, New Hero.in.es, highlights contemporary heroism and activism while examining future possibilities. In parallel, the project brings anonymized figures from colonial archives into focus, and recognizes them as hero.ine.s. This work delves into the complexities of activism, emphasizing the vulnerability, hope, and resilience that shape the lives of those involved.

As part of this initiative, Brussels-based activists are invited to experience the deliberate slowness of collodion photography and pose questions about the nature of heroism. The portraits created as part of this project will be displayed and listened to in the vitrines of BNA-BBOT. Invitations for public activities will follow.

Picture credits: Troubled Archives, Silvano Magnone

Troubled Archives is Rokia Bamba, Brenda Bikoko, Loes Jacobs, Peggy Pierrot and Antje Van Wichelen.

This is Us. This is Brussels. is an artistic and social design project that builds a "human archive" with the stories of 1000 people to make Brussels and the people of Brussels of the 2020s visible: a super-diverse, young, multifaceted and complex city in the heart of Europe. In doing so, we will search for the past as well as the futures of Brussels inhabitants. We record and show their stories and expectations to discover and create new alliances and more "us’

This is Us. This is Brussels. was designed and developed by Wetopia for Brussels2030 in the framework of the candidacy for the European Capital of Culture in 2030, with the support of urban.brussels. The archive is housed in and accessible via our Sonotheek.

Une approche de la fiction dans l’archive dans la création artistique et sonore contemporaine

« J'ai pris une telle habitude de ressentir le faux comme le vrai, les choses rêvées aussi nettement que les choses vues, que j'ai perdu la capacité humaine, erronée me semble-t-il, de distinguer la vérité du mensonge. »

Fernando Pessoa, Livre de L’intranquillité

L’archive, à travers les âges et les époques, transmet l’histoire personnelle et collective. Porteuse d’une forme de « véracité », elle est aujourd’hui incontournable dans la création artistique contemporaine et sous une multiplicité de formes. L’archive en tant que matière de création est révélateur des préoccupations actuelles sur les doubles sens et d’une information biaisée, l’heure de l’intelligence artificielle et des « fake news ».

Au cours de quatre séances, Claire Ducène proposera une approche théorique des instigateurs et prémisses en littérature mais aussi des artistes modernes et contemporains de toute discipline qui ont utilisé l’archive comme matériel de fiction. Chaque séance sera ponctuée par la présence d’un chercheur ou d’un artiste sonore de la scène contemporaine belge.

PROGRAMME

5 septembre 2024 - Christophe Meurée

12 septembre 2024 - Noëlie Plé

19 septembre 2024- Anne Lepère

26 septembre 2024 - Stéphanie Roland

Informations pratiques

Dates : 5, 12, 19, 26 septembre 2024 de 18h à 21h chez BNA-BBOT (119 rue de Laeken 1000 Bruxelles)

Langue : FR

Tarif : 15 euros/séance ou 48 euros pour l’ensemble du cycle

Inscriptions auprès de info@bna-bbot.be  

image :« Where are you in these images? » notebook of torn & recollected notes, Claire Ducène from the work « Missing people », Stéphanie Roland, 2022 (c) Antoine Debeauvais

In January 2023, BBOT will launch Narrating Diversity. Every eighteen months, BBOT invites a (sound) artist as curator. One curator, one year and a half, one theme, different audiences. With this, over the next five-year policy period, in cooperation with the three curators, BBOT wants to open up its organisation and operations to new audiences. We want to give new audiences in long-term co-creative trajectories impulses towards an artistic handling of sound and listening, as well as the formation of multi-voiced narratives.

Period 2023-2024: Maarten De Vrieze

During an intervention of 'desire lines' at the ferry terminal in Calais, I came across the words "I wish for the future", written down on a guardrail at the end of a cul-de-sac. These words struck me like a scream and made me think: 'for what future do I want to work?' Based on the conviction that human beings can play a role as artists, just as an organ in the body is vital, I developed my practice. The artist as an organ of the body that is society. Using encounters as a starting point, my interventions create openings in the conditioned fence through which the imagination gains space to alternatives. Artistic gestures that make tangible what remains invisible due to dominant forms of power. In living together, the question "For what future do I want to work?" forces the question "For whom do I want to work?".

Right now, I have unfolded my tent and set it up inside the showcase of BNA-BBOT. My nomadic practice finds temporary shelter there and this at the art organisation's request to curate the 2023-2024 season. From my practice, of which some elements of 'desire lines' are present in the showcase, I engage in dialogue with other artists, researchers and philosophers. Visitors are invited to my tent to follow these developments while I sonically search for testimonies that guide me through the city of Brussels.

As a curator, I look around me with the same gaze that I have developed in my art practice. In the role of curator, I ask myself what an art institution can do, if the word 'cura' literally means 'to care for'? What should the role of a house be, when the public outdoor sphere is shaped by racist discourse and fake news? When information deviates from our reality what future do we face? Focusing on hard facts and precarious testimonies, Bridges makes itself visible in a sea of disinformation. Using the microphone as a tool, stripped of visual form elements, makes hearing become the focus of attention. From the voice, precarious witnesses become palpable all the way to the body, society.

Maarten De Vrieze

Over the period 2022-2024 BNA-BBOT will be present with Exit in the prisons of Sint-Gillis, Vorst and Berkendael. In Exit, BNA-BBOT creates an artistic sound profile of the prisons. A participatory process that comes about in collaboration with inmates, guards, management and local residents. The prisons of Sint-Gillis, Vorst and Berkendael are moving to the large prison complex in Haren. With Exit, we accompany the closure of the three Brussels prisons by mapping small and big events, stories from the distant and recent past and field recordings. Many sounds that can be heard in the prisons now will be lost during the move to and the modernisation of the prison in Haren. 

The aim of this project is to create an auditory archive of the three sites, to preserve stories and sounds and to open them up to the public through sound installations in the prisons in the period after the move. The installations are site specific and immersive, exploring acoustics, architecture and materials through sound and making them accessible to the general public.

Collaborations: De Rode Antraciet, Gemeentelijke Bibliotheek van Sint-Gillis, Gemeentelijke Bibliotheek van Vorst, La Fonderie, BRUZZ, De Vlaamse Gemeenschap.

Voices and stories, that's the basis. Tales and radio replays available in the form of podcasts that we produce or that we accompany, which we also broadcast in our monthly show La Base every first Thursday of the month at 12:45 on Radio Panik (105.4 fm). At the base of radio, there are voices, stories, the multitude. Radio must consider its listeners as experts. Giving them a voice is the basis. The podcasts we offer are often the result of live radio broadcasts made with various audiences in the context of workshops.

Local sound travel agency 

Sonorama is a Brussels-based travel agency that has the particularity of proposing unusual sound trips within the city. A catalogue lists a range of proposals for a wide audience. All types of travellers can find something to suit them!

The Sonorama catalogue is the result of an ongoing participatory process. It is gradually taking shape through animation devices and artistic interventions. The proposed journeys are all located in the city of Brussels, either as a physical trajectory through the city, a description or a free interpretation of a Brussels location, or as a memory or dream in the head of a Brussels citizen. These journeys reflect the diversity and cosmopolitanism of Brussels, its landscapes and secret spaces, its current or future social issues, its multitude of languages... Each journey tells a piece of history and stimulates a fresh look at the urban landscape.

Vitrien is, literally and figuratively, the BNA-BBOT showcase with a permanent sound installation audible from the street. But Vitrien is also a space for artistic development in which the creations of young sound artists, inspired by the BNA-BBOT database, are exhibited in the form of a temporary installation. Each year, a call for projects is launched for this purpose, from which four artists are selected. With this initiative, BNA-BBOT wants to keep its archive alive and creative, to draw attention to its work and to create opportunities for young Brussels creators. The previous Vitrien were taken over by the artists: Lukas De Clerck (Vitrien 1), KU Leuven International Master of Architecture (Vitrien 2), Rébecca Fruitman & Amina Saâdi (Vitrien 3), Pierre Royland (Vitrien 4), ooooo (Vitrien 5), Mia Melvær & Les Microsondes (Vitrien 6)

Cities are gaining importance worldwide as places where people settle but also as contexts for research and policy. The VUB and Erasmushogeschool Brussel invited BBOT to join them in preparing the candidacy of Brussels as European Capital of Culture in 2030. By 2030, most of the world's population will be urban, with a young population, diverse in origin and often in a vulnerable position.

We strongly believe in a transdisciplinary approach, bringing together theoretical and empirical-methodological frameworks from socio-agogical and futures research in order to get a broad view of the desires, strengths and needs of young people between 16 and 28 years old. By stimulating rigorous imagination, among other things by means of sound and sound perception, we arrive at a wide range of images of the future and citizenship ideas.

Kifesh? Arrète de me ziar! Speel nog een pokoe, ofzo.

The Brussels vocabulary is far more extensive than can be found in dictionaries. It is a mishmash that the great Van Dale or Le Robert cannot understand. Brussels resonates with the sounds of 104 languages spoken and mixed within its territory on a daily basis. Brusselsspeaks is interested in the encounters, collisions and hybridisations that are played out and created between all these languages, and is looking for new Brussels dialects.

The project Imaginary Neighbourhoods seeks to reveal the topography of a neighbourhood through the imaginations of its occupants. The project takes place in various neighbourhoods, uses flexible methods and, at the end of a participatory and artistic process, leads to specific productions: a temporary cinema, a parliament, an exhibition, a publication, an audio-walk.... Each edition is carried out in collaboration with many local partners, community centers, schools, nursing homes, committees, cultural centres, with artists and in several languages. The first three editions took place in the Anneessens, Quartier Nord and Chant d'oiseau districts of Woluwe.

Intersongs is a musical project that brings together people from different backgrounds. In the course of its workshops, choirs, associations, schools and youth centres meet, sing together and share the stories, aesthetics and cultures that constitute them.

Voices mingle and intermingle to sing in unison or in polyphony on regular but new collective creations.

BNA-BBOT is a member of the Ecouter le Monde project, a project led by Radio France International (Monica Fantini) in partnership with BNA-BBOT, the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, and the E-Jicom School of Journalism and New Media in Dakar. 
Écouter le Monde evokes cultures, languages and imaginations through sounds from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. A Parisian morning in the hubbub of the metro with its slamming doors, another at the Bobo-Dioulasso market with the harangues of the vendors, a journey into the childhood sound memories of an inhabitant of the banks of the Danube, an excursion near the crackling glacier in Argentine Patagonia or even midnight sounded by the bells of Saint Mark's Square in Venice. All forms are explored: mosaics, Polaroids, snapshots, scenes from daily life, the suitcases and sound memories of inhabitants, artists and journalists... Écouter le Monde is also an internet platform whose vocation is to publish the sounds of the world, echoes of our daily lives, our territories and our humanity. This database aims to develop the practice, meaning and pleasure of listening. Écouter Le Monde is a project supported by RFI, E-Jicom, the École Supérieure de Journalisme, des Métiers de l'Internet et de la Communication in Dakar, the association BNA-BBOT Bruxelles Nous Appartient - Brussel Behoort Ons Toe -, the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music in Venice and the Atelier du Bruit in Paris.

Écouter le Monde is broadcast every Saturday at 16:25 GMT, Sundays at 03:37 GMT and 05:55 GMT on RFI, and in Africa on Sundays at 07:25 GMT.

Debates, expression workshops and citizen journalism on social issues with young people from Brussels aged 12 to 25.

Bruxitizen invites young people aged 12 to 25 to participate in the public debate

It is a project led by the ASBL Agence Alter since 2012 in partnership with higher education institutions (ISFSC, Université Saint-Louis, IHECS), secondary schools located in Brussels and the associative sector (youth and youth assistance).

Deployed over a period of 6 months, Bruxitizen is designed to enable young people to meet, inform themselves, produce information themselves and put forward innovative projects.

Workshops & debates

Bruxitizen consists of media workshops, expression workshops (verbal jousting) and debates to learn about and compare points of view and to encourage meetings between different social actors, different generations, etc.