Abstract
This article explores Anthropoiesis, the authors’ eco-performance installation presented as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Time, Space, Existence exhibition at the Venice Biennial during the Venice Biennale Architettura 2023. Drawing on David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019), the project investigated how ecocritical texts might be reconceived as multisensory artworks, advancing the concept of slow listening to engage with the Anthropocene’s scalar extremes. By integrating spoken word performance, soundscapes and visual poetry, Anthropoiesis sought to disrupt anthropocentric narratives, compelling audiences to confront the disorienting temporal and spatial dynamics of ecological crises. Foregrounding the urgency of improving attunement to landscapes, the article situates Anthropoiesis within the broader challenge of anthropogenic planetary destabilisation. Its multidisciplinary design reimagines Farrier’s ecocritical text as a sonic and visual assemblage, layered with living, organic and technologically generated soundscapes. Positioned within a nested exhibition alongside Ainslie Murray’s Registry of Itinerant Architectures and Joshua Zeunert’s Shallow Roots, Deep Incisions, offered a multisensory exploration of fluctuating scales and temporal horizons, creating an immersive experience to transcend traditional narrative structures. The article argues that sonic ecologies can help to reorient audiences within fractured Anthropocenic landscapes. Through the lens of slow listening, it analyses how the installation provokes reflection, destabilises linear perceptions of time and space and facilitates poiesis as a threshold moment of ecological revelation. Discussion moves from the project’s interdisciplinary approach to examine the transformative possibilities of careful listening as a critical and creative intervention. In doing so, it seeks to foster heightened attentiveness to more-than-human presences and advance collaborative performance-making to address the sublime tensions of the Anthropocenic moment.
