Liquid Architecture returns for a third Polyphonic Social event at Abbotsford Convent with a focus on multiple listening and social sound.

Polyphonic Social 2018 begins on Thursday 26 and Friday 27 April with installations by artists Thembi Soddell and Libby Harward, who’s a descendent of the Ngugi people of Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) in the Quandamooka (Moreton Bay), residing on Yugambeh country (Gold Coast). Exploring poly-expressions of multifaceted emotion and sovereign signalling, these installations continue throughout the weekend as each invites the spectator to consider their unsingular self.

In two parts, Saturday 28 April takes the form of a series of conversations exploring the social value of experimental forms of listening. Following a welcome from Uncle Bill Nicholson, in the performance program, artist Libby Harward will de- and recode the illegibility of sovereign signs, and how different modes of listening to country may be possible. Hijos de Cecilia (Children of Cecilia) will collectively channel the work, spirit, and magic of the great Chilean artist-poet Cecilia Vicuña. Composer Megan Alice Clune will conduct an increasingly vocoded conversation with herself. Sound artist Ariel Bustamente will help us explore why we say the things we do, and how to celebrate the way all conversations are, on some level, awkward. Social agents Ceri Hann and Lynda Roberts (Public Assembly) will conceptually deconstruct the conventions of the workshop format as a paradoxically intimate, aural collective experience; and researcher Lauren Rosewarne might attempt to predict the polymorphously positive sex noises of the future.

In the ensuing workshop program, artist, musician and activist Clare Cooper will guide us through a series of experimental feminist futuring exercises using social sound to develop new critical listening skills. Clare will be assisted by a team of experienced facilitators who will work with small groups to consider the future sounds we are drawn to, what and how we will be hearing in the future, and the tools, attitudes, energies and forms of sonic agency we need to cultivate in order to “back-cast” from a more just future to the social sound of our present moment. Facilitators of radical openness include Will Scott-Kemmis, Bree Turner, Bruce Mowson, Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe, Bridget Chappel and more.