Eva Rowson

Conference Report. December 2024
Are we listening?
“What is the difference between hearing and listening? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination?”
--- Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening, 2022.
Are we listening? Really listening?
As Pauline Oliveros says, listening is activism. But do we often avoid this kind of activist listening, as we know that we may hear truths which are uncomfortable and challenge the way we have always done things?
The themes and questions of the 56th CIMAM Annual Conference in Los Angeles to explore Sustainable Futures: How? When? For Whom? require a lot of listening. More than 30 hours of listening in 3 days from many speakers and peers from around the world, from different institutions and from different practices. Answers to these questions could shape our futures of work, economy, society and life. But perhaps more importantly, it is these questions that we need to keep listening to. To listen in the way that Oliveros calls Deep Listening: the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix, in which compassion and love are the core motivating principles guiding creative decision making and our actions in the world.
Feminism: we hear what each other can hear.
Feminism: we hear each other hear how we are not heard.
Feminism: we are louder not only when we are heard together, but when we hear together
--- Sara Ahmed, Feminist Ears, 2022
How do we engage in active listening in a conference like this? We rely on several tools which construct the listening experience – such as: How are the talks programmed? Who talks first? Who talks last? Who is given a microphone? Who is unable to hear? Who is not heard?
Mark Bradford started the conference by advocating for listening as key to our work as cultural organisers. He said we need to listen to what our communities need – and make sure they know they are not just listened to, but heard. It might not be sexy or made for an art world, but it’s vital to make the partnerships more equitable.
Deep or active listening also acknowledges that we do not all hear the same, we do not all share the same values and we come from different practices and lands which shape how we listen - or don´t listen. The concept of sustainable futures – as Teesa Bahana, director of 32° East Ugandan Arts Trust, said on the last day – is not the same for all of us. Even if we all want to imagine that, gathered together in the conference room of the 56th CIMAM Annual Conference, we “are all on same page” in our quest for sustainable futures, globally we are experiencing environmental, economic and societal disaster in vastly unequitable ways. And therefore to answer the question of the future of sustainability also requires us to listen in more equitable ways.
These things we’re hearing cannot fall on closed ears.
--- Michelle LaVallee, National Gallery of Canada,
in her response to
Sustainable Communities: Indigenous Perspectives
and Worldviews,
56th CIMAM Annual Conference.
For those of us descended from colonisers, we come from a very active practice of un-listening. In the first day of conference, the large, privately-funded museum world welcomed us to Los Angeles. In the following days in visits around the city, the artist-run spaces, non-profits, community-nourishing organisations introduced us to the ancestors of these stolen lands of the Tongva, Kizh, Chumash and more: lands which are now known as Los Angeles. These ancestors and caretakers were honoured and they were heard.
In the final day of the conference on Sustainable Communities: Indigenous Perspectives and Worldviews, the speakers acknowledged the those who took care of and sustained indigenous lands before they were colonised. Candice Hopkins ended her presentation about the Forge Project in New York by talking about how she can hear the insects coming back in the field outside, which has been re-wilded and re-sown by indigenous neighbours and practitioners. For her, this is the sound of sustainability. Of listening to the elders of these lands, who understand both their past and their future more intimately than perhaps our environmental-condition-measuring-tools ever could.
If we had started with this section at the beginning of the conference, would we already be listening in a different way? Would the speakers from the large museums and foundations even change their presentations after actively listening to how we honour where we stand today? That one day of the programme was dedicated to indigenous perspectives was refreshing and vital. But the fact it was siloed into a specific section and structured to be heard at the end of the conference, meant that already the conditions for deep listening were conditioned by the colonial museums we heard at the beginning. Curator, writer, artist and activist Djon Mundine also asked why we only listening to indigenous communities in times of crisis?
For us to take sustainability really seriously, maybe we need to undo everything we have ever known in order to start thinking differently. This is the founding principle of the artist collective Crenshaw Dairy Mart that we visited, who are present on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples, the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar. Their values are: Ancestry, Abolition, Healing. As Sara Zwede also spoke of during the conference: Change is necessary for sustainability – but how much are we willing to change, how far and for whom?
In an international museum conference, what would it mean to totally undo the continuing value judgements about what work is creative and transformational? To hear from museum workers who usually do not attend or speak here? To invite the workers who are fundamental in enacting, sustaining, maintaining our sustainability work - but who also often go uncelebrated, or even unacknowledged.
The cleaners, catering teams, front of house, maintenance workers, gardeners, economists, human resource teams. How far can our aims for sustainability actually go in changing the world, when we still do not hear from the workers who will enact this sustainability in our employment contracts, supplier agreements, waste management protocols? When we talk about sustainability in the conference hall, but throw away our plastic lunch boxes into the trash one hour later? When we talk about equitable listening, but not everyone can hear well at the roundtable discussion as there is no microphone?
What are the tools which will move us from hearing about sustainability in a conference to listening?
“While focus is often placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of free speech, listening is radically key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, and social transformation.”
--- Curatorial Statement, The Listening Biennial, 2021
During our visit to the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Senior Curator told me that out of her window in nearby Snow Creek she can see the plants on the desert mountain literally burning in the summer. In the 25 years since she has lived there, the plants have always come back to life. But now in the last few years, they are burned beyond hope. Later that night, we heard the sprinkler maintaining the lush gardens of the homes of private collectors and the green golf course of the Tamarisk private members club - and we didn´t say anything.
The world - and the 56th CIMAM Annual Conference - is full of contradictions and differences. We need to listen together, listening deeply beyond our own spheres of work, life and imaginations, to really hear these differences. There were many answers proposed to the questions of Sustainable Futures: How? When? For Whom? during the 3 intense and generous days of the conference. But the conference left me thinking less about what we listened to and more how we construct the conditions to make sure we are deeply listening to each other, our communities, the world. And then, what we do next.
Biography
Eva Rowson (b. 1985) is a curator and director of Bergen Kjøtt, one of Norway’s largest non-profit cultural venues. They produce 150 public events a year (exhibitions, performances, concerts) and are home to 110 long-term tenants working in sound & music. In 2021, she co-founded GRIP – Norway’s only sound engineering training program to empower more women, non-binary, transgender technicians in the cultural field.
Her work as a curator over the last 10 years is rooted in maintenance, collaboration, creating equity – focusing on how different types of work are valued and the consequences for sustainable (and radical) organizational development. This research is at the core of her leadership reflections at Bergen Kjøtt "#AdventuresInConcrete: R(adical)evolution, courage and maintenance in changing institutional structures" and curatorial projects: 38b – independent artist-run living room exhibition space (London, 2010-18); "Como imaginar una musea?" – Catalan-Spanish-English public program on creating alternative, feminist cultural institutions (BAR Project, Barcelona, 2017-19); "Who’s doing the washing up?" – curatorial program on institutional re-imagining (Re-Imagine Europe, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway & Lighthouse Brighton, UK, 2018-19).
Since 2019, Eva is lead lecturer of "Collaborative Practices" on Fine Arts Master’s program, University of Bergen. In 2019, she curated "with eyes closed, call me" at Bergen Kunsthall, the graduation exhibition of the Fine Art Master’s Program. Before moving to Bergen in 2020, she worked in fundraising, external relations, project management at non-profit institutions and museums including The Showroom, Delfina Foundation and Tate (London, UK) and Bergen Assembly (Norway).
Eva holds a 1st class BA Honors degree in Fine Art (University of Leeds) and she was an associate artist of Open School East (London). In 2024, she completed the leadership program "Transformational Leadership for Sustainability" led by Dr. Monica Sharma, former Director of Leadership & Capacity Building at United Nations.
Eva Rowson, Director, Bergen Kjøtt, Bergen, Norway, has been awarded by OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo.