Parasonic is a research project on the social and racial constructions of aural practices, based on a critique of a regime of thinking and listening to sound that is over-represented in the arts, and which aims to create spaces for the transmission of fugitive aural practices. It is part of contemporary studies on the cultural history of perceptions and works alongside researchers who have been deconstructing racializing practices and politics of perception for a century (in particular Du Bois, 1920; Fanon, 1949; Baldwin, 1955; Morrison, 1992; Glissant, 1990; Gilroy, 1995; hooks, 1997; Hartman, 1997; Haraway, 1997; Wynter, 2003; Ahmed, 2007; Harney and Moten, 2022; Campt, 2017, 2023).
The project articulates two levels of discussion: a substantive level based on theoretical debates on the notion of ‘white aurality’. And an operational level based on the audio-visual editing of filmed artists' stories of listening and their public played in spaces for the transmission of practical knowledge. Two levels of goals are therefore also articulated: to gain knowledge and self-critical awareness about the relationship between racialization and listening practices; and to create pieces designed as tools to transmit listenings what the regime of white aurality does not hear: ways of listening that escape it, or that ignore it, or that oppose it (hence the term para-sonic).
Research data progressively available on
VisionCreationNewSound.ch
Image: Jessie Cox, Sounds of Black Switzerland, Duke University Press, 2025 (cover detail)
