Episode 01, Spells (28:52 min):
What?! from Balcony Tracks (Velibor Božović) / World peace (Bruce Nauman) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Senada, Eva & Dženana) ENGLISH , BOSNIAN / Inside a speed train (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Question Period (Ann Marie Fleming) ENGLISH / Extract from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) (Boonmee talking to the spirit of his dead wife as he is nearing his own death) THAI / Hotel Amnesia (The Dim Coast/Steve Bates)
Episode 02, Shattering (28:54 min):
Glass from Balcony Tracks (Velibor Božović) / La Jetée (Chris Marker) FRENCH / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Amila talking about the moment in Istanbul when she learned that her sister Aida was killed in Sarajevo) BOSNIAN / La mort d'Antonin Artaud (Pierre André Arcand) / Junk (recorded by Zeenat Nagree) / Extract from Ashes (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) (narrator remembering a dream within a dream, drawing buildings in his hometown, from memory) THAI
Episode 03, Search (28:49 min):
Extract from Sans Soleil (Chris Marker) (the day in from of tv set, that memory box / coincidence, or the sense of history / to make a friend of horror) ENGLISH / Drone flying indoors (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Zlatko talking about his last night at his family home in Banja Luka as the Serbian military police is searching for him while he is hiding in the attic) BOSNIAN / Street scene (altered) in Bombay (recorded by Velibor Božović) / On the train entering New Delhi (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Zlatko talking about his escape from Banja Luka) BOSNIAN / Driving through snowstorm from Bruxelles to Paris (recorded by Velibor Božović)
Episode 04, Folds (26:35 min):
Celebration in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin Dargah one Thursday evening in Jan 2016 (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Asphalt from Balcony Tracks (Velibor Božović) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Emir talking about his return to Sarajevo, as 18y old, to look for the body of his father who was killed in the occupied part of Sarajevo) BOSNIAN / Extract from Atlantiques (Mati Diop) (Three friends sitting around the fire in Dakar and talk about Serigne’s journey on a boat to Spain) WOLOF / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Emir talking about moving the remains of his father to a cemetery in Sarajevo and about how his grandfather’s family is all killed, including his twin sister, during the WW2) BOSNIAN / Vienna street piano (recorded by Steve Bates) / Rain (recorded by Velibor Božović)
Episode 05, Waves (26:17 min)
Flagellation (recorded by Zeenat Nagree) / Extract from A Drowning Man (Mahdi Fleifel) (a young man in exile trying to survive in a foreign city) ARABIC / Loner from Balcony Tracks (Velibor Božović) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Senada, Eva, Emir & Dženana) ENGLISH, BOSNIAN / Grand Memories hotel beach (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Extract from Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman) (a soldier hallucinates on the boat then, upon landing, participates in a slaughter of an innocent family) HEBREW / Valparaiso Playa Caleta (recorded by Steve Bates)
Episode 06, Landings (25:24 min):
Extract from First Contact (Robin Anderson, Bob Connolly) (intro to documentary film about the first encounter between highland native people of New Guinea and white man in search of gold)) ENGLISH, UNKNOWN (one of 839 living languages spoken in Papua New Guinea) / Extract from Solaris (Stanislaw Lem) (Hattie Naylor's dramatization for BBC Radio 4 2007) ENGLISH / Walking through snow towards Lago di Braies (recorded by Claudia Zini) / Extract from Three Cheers for the Whale (Mario Ruspoli, Chris Marker) (from the short film about human’s relationship with whales) ENGLISH / Extract from The Magic Sun (Phill Niblock) (from music film about the performance by Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Emir talking about entering Baghdad with his US Army unit in the first days of invasion) BOSNIAN / Crow funeral (recorded by Zeenat Nagree)
Episode 07, Stillness (34:52 min):
Extract from The Imprint / La huella (Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski) (extract from documentary film in which the director and a forensic specialist offer two distinct perspectives while talking about the role of images found in the archives of Peruvian Reconciliation commission, documenting Peruvian civil war) SPANISH / Morning fire in the stove (recorded by Boris Božović) / The Life and Death of a Photograph (Gerard Malanga) (reading his poem inspired by a photograph of a woman who committed suicide in the woods near Srebrenica) ENGLISH / Birds (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Azra talking about secretly taking a few photographs and passing them to the first foreign journalists, Ed Vulliamy & Penny Marshall, visiting Trnopolje camp)) BOSNIAN / Schoolyard (recorded by Velibor Božović)
Episode 08, Heartbeats (34:45 min):
Bertolt Brecht Testifies Before the House Un-American Activities Committee in (1947) ENGLISH / Heartbeats of Sarajevo (Haris Sahačić) (Sarajevo, Old town, Clockwork tower) / An den kleinen Radioapparat (Hanns Eisler) / Extract from Listening, How Did You Get Here (Ljija and Muhamed talking about their experiences during the early days of the occupation of Bijeljina) BOSNIAN / Extract from Kindah (Ephraim Asili) (a short film that uses unifying power of music to connect diasporic community of NYC to with people form the freed slave-town of Accompong, Jamaica) / Sounds of Marcil Avenue (recorded by Velibor Božović) / Metro station musician (recorded by Velibor Božović)
Listening Sessions, from Spells to Heartbeats
Listening Sessions is a collection of sound collages assembled from various voices, sounds and audio recordings that the artist either recorded himself or collected from different sources. The resulting work is a borderless sound space where past, future and imagined lives, lives in transition, various languages, human and non-human voices, music, soundscapes, woods, oceans, deserts, cities, and imagined territories, coexist. Listening Sessions was originally created as part of Velibor Božović’s art and community radio project titled Radio Elsewheres that debuted during the artist’s exhibition Unfolding Elsewheres in KRAK Center for Contemporary Culture in Bihać, BiH in June of 2023. Listening Sessions project was also installed as the stand alone work in the gallery space.
Just like the first edition of Radio Elsewheres [re.01] the Listening Sessions project is a fluid assembly of voices across language, conceptualized in the context of displacement, departures, arrivals, sharing, listening and re-telling as the driving subjects.
The Listening Sessions, from Spells to Heartbeats uses voices, sounds, recordings and works from/by Bruce Nauman, Senada Adžem, Eva Cvijanović, Dženana Salihović, Anne Marie Flemming, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Steve Bates, Chris Marker, Amila Buturović, Pierre André Arcand, Zeenat Nagree, Zlatko Ćosić, Bertolt Brecht, Haris Sahačić, Hanns Esler, Ljiljana i Muhamed Vodeničarević, Ephraim Asili, Emir Kamenica, Mati Diop, Mahdi Fleifel, Ari Folman, Robin Anderson, Bob Connolly, Stanislaw Lem, Hattie Naylor, Claudia Zini, Mario Ruspoli, Phil Niblock, Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Emir Čustović, Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski, Boris Božović, Gerard Malanga, Azra Blažević and Velibor Božović.