Workshop [Morphine Raum Berlin]
Siegmar Zacharias – “Listening in Complexity”
How do we stay in relation when different realities, needs, histories and griefs collide? How can we listen without rushing towards agreement, resolution or repair?
Listening in Complexity is a four-hour embodied workshop combining the somacoustic practice of Practicing Futures While Grieving with tools from conflict transformation and decolonising Nonviolent Communication. At its centre is a binaural listening session composed through voice work and intimate spatial recordings, enhancing somacoustic listening: hearing not only with the ears, but through vibration, sensation, proximity and the whole body.
We begin with the body, listening to sound, sensation, grief and the many things that can be present at once. From there, we move toward relational listening and conflict. Using and troubling tools from Nonviolent Communication, we explore how to distinguish what happened from the stories we tell about it; how to listen for feelings, needs and values; and how to recognise the histories and power relations that enter a conversation before we do.
Listening here does not mean agreement, neutrality or endless availability. It can include boundaries, refusal, confrontation and stepping away. Rather than making conflict disappear, we ask what becomes possible when we stay in relation without collapsing difference.
Together we practice listening across three scales: What is happening in me? What is happening between us? What conditions are shaping what is happening?
Siegmar Zacharias is a Berlin-based performance artist, artistic researcher and conflict transformation practitioner. Her work moves between performance, somacoustic listening and radical pedagogy, exploring grief, conflict, intimacy, plant inteligencies and collective transformation. Her somacoustic listening practice investigates how sound and voice act on the nervous system—how vibration, proximity and binaural sound are sensed through the whole body, shaping states of attention, regulation and relation. Alongside her artistic practice, she has worked for over three decades with conflict transformation, developing decolonial approaches to Nonviolent Communication. Her work has been presented internationally, in festivals, exhibition spaces, in forests and up in the sky.
VENUE: * Morphine Raum Berlin – Köpenicker Straße 147 Hinterhof, 1. Etage, 10997 Berlin