Paper short abstract:

Drawing on sonic experiences in Germany and Australia, as well as mythologies attached to them, this paper argues for eco-acoustic means through which to (re)imagine the good life (buen vivir) beyond late liberal political and economic interests.

Paper long abstract:

In 2015, Marrugeku, a dance company from the Kimberley region in Northwest Australia, performed Cut the Sky in Ludwigshafen (Germany). The piece mixes contemporary and traditional dance with live music and Dreaming stories to tell about heated conflicts between resource extraction and Indigenous heritage preservation. A couple of days after their performance, I went on a walk with Edwin Lee Mulligan, the storyteller on whose poems Cut the Sky is based, and Bruce Goring, the then managing director of Marrugeku to speak about their work. In 2017, Bruce, Edwin and I went to Noonkanbah (Australia), the Indigenous site that inspired Cut the Sky. Drawing on the sonic experiences in these different places, as well as mythologies attached to them, the paper argues for eco-acoustic means through which to (re)imagine the good life (buen vivir) beyond late liberal political and economic interests. I propose the method of ‘listening care-fully’ as a tool to carry the post-growth paradigm into a wider public, via school curricula, art projects and sound installations. ‘Listening care-fully’ enables people to take part in enacting change, in commonly sensing hope and togetherness - a sensory commons of human and more-than-human actors. Through ‘thick-description’ of our shared eco-acoustic experiences of place, I argue that listening care-fully provides access to alternative scenarios to structure society, technology and politics in accordance to contemporary needs, reshaping attitudes and behaviours towards sufficiency as a leading principle to meet future challenges.