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Saggi per la call-sezione sottoposta a peer review

No. 9 (2025): Miscellanea II

Per un ascolto trans-corporeo: sulla performatività acustica di Christine Sun Kim

DOI
https://doi.org/10.54103/connessioni/28789
Submitted
May 2, 2025
Published
2025-09-08

Abstract

Listening, historically shaped by hearing-centered paradigms and audio-fonocentric systems, is reconceptualized through Deaf epistemologies as a trans-corporeal performativity, extending beyond mere cochlear competence or the articulation of a given sound. In the work of Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim, sound emerges as an entanglement of tactile intensities, affective currents, visual vectors, and frequency patterns, shaping the acoustic sphere through a confluence of vibrations, movements, scents, and temperature variations. Integrating Deaf, Sound, and Performance Studies with ecocritical new materialism, listening dynamics are approached as the co-emergence of bodies, vibrant matter, biological rhythms, and situated knowledge in intra-active relations. The subjectivity that “feels” does not simply inhabit the webs of things but participates actively in them, modulating and being modulated by pressures, grazes, touches, discourses, and practices of resistance and repair. In this context, listening becomes con-vibrating: a dynamic entanglement of human and more-than-human energies and material-discursive force, configuring itself as an ethical-political practice capable of challenging audist position, sensory hierarchies, and sonic barriers within a horizon of «acoustic justice», where values and norms are enacted, renegotiated, and unsettled.

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