Brandon LaBelle

The Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Elena Loizidou terms “dream-action”: the figurative and poetic staging of world making activity.

The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group, and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Gerald Raunig, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler, and Manuela Zechner.

published in June 2020

Drawing upon traditions of socially engaged poetics, Brandon LaBelle's The Other Citizen presents narratives of contemporary crisis and exclusionary politics—from American teenagers in the maze of neoliberal privatization to those caught between borders of nation-states—outlining the force of a planetary citizenry.

Brandon LaBelle is a musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator and editor (founder of Errant Bodies). His work is based on performance, sound installation, recording and use of found sounds. LaBelle reflects fluently on his artistic practice, drawing attention to the social dimensions of listening and manner in which sounds, in multiple variations, play upon public spaces, and drawing connections across media and incorporate video, as well as architectural and sculptural vocabularies into an expanded field that embraces rhetorical and spatial challenges.

Published September 2020.

In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative "unlikely publics" in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the "space of appearance" as the condition for political action and survival.

Going Out explores the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts – from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today’s manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of 51 historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives and reflections.

Essay by Elena Biserna.

Contributions by Max Neuhaus, Willem de Ridder, William Levy, Collective Actions Group, David Helbich, Janet Cardiff, Jacek Smolicki, Carolyn Chen, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Hildegard Westerkamp, Albert Mayr, Tim Ingold, Akio Suzuki, katrinem, Beatrice Ferrara & Leandro Pisano, Catherine Clover, AM Kanngieser, Gascia Ouzounian & Sarah Lappin, Ultra-red, Vivian Caccuri, Stefan Szczelkun, LIGNA, Edyta Jarząb, Oupa Sibeko, Brian Hioe, Brandon LaBelle, Adrian Piper, Andra McCartney & Sandra Gabriele, Amanda Gutiérrez, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Stephanie Springgay, Carmen Papalia, Christine Sun Kim, Charles Eppley, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Viv Corringham, BNA-BBOT, Ella Parry-Davies & Ann, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Gwenola Wagon & Stéphane Degoutin, Eleni Ikoniadou, Justin Bennett, Christina Kubisch & Christoph Cox, RYBN, Alisa Oleva, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Anna Raimondo, Libby Harward.