Name: Punctum Theory Club #3 | Elia Moretti | Agency: What Listening Makes Possible
Start: 2026-02-17T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Krásova 27, 13000 Prague, Czech Republic

Punctum Theory Club #3
Elia Moretti
Agency: What Listening Makes Possible
/ Sound, Care, and World-Making
This lecture explores listening as a political and ethical practice, approaching sound as a site of agency, responsibility, and solidarity. It proposes listening as a force that shapes social relations, distributes attention, and conditions how we live together.
Drawing from sound studies, political theory, and performance practice, the lecture examines listening as a holding environment — a space capable of sustaining difference, vulnerability, and conflict without collapse. It asks how listening affords solidarity and care, how sonic agency emerges through shared attention, and how openness can be learned and practiced through sound.
These questions are grounded in artistic case studies from Elia’s own practice, including Symposium Musicum, a social sound experiment developed in eastern Slovakia that investigates relations between Romani and non-Romani communities through collective listening and sonic encounters, foregrounding listening as a tool for recognition and negotiation across social divides. They also extend to Republika Zahradníiíiíiíiíi, a separatist republic founded by the performance group Ferst Dadler, where citizenship is granted through listening and presence, affirming existence itself as a political condition. Together, these practices open onto a broader reflection on acoustic justice, examining how sound reflects and reinforces social inequalities, how certain voices are amplified while others are rendered inaudible, and how listening can operate both as a mechanism of control and as a form of resistance.
Ultimately, the lecture invites listening to be understood as a world-making practice — one that does not merely respond to reality, but actively participates in its transformation, redistributing agency, cultivating solidarity, and opening possibilities for more just forms of coexistence.
Elia Moretti is a musician and researcher working across sound, performance and expanded listening practices. From his base in Prague, he moves between stage, page and studio, treating listening as a transformative and political force — one that builds relationships, generates agency and expands the imagination. He collaborates internationally in artistic and educational contexts and is co-creator of the performance group Ferst Dadler.
Talk will be given in English language.
Entry by voluntary donation.
Door: 19:00 | Lecture: 19:30
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Punctum Theory Club is a series of occasional talks, discussions and other formats aimed philosophical, political, anthropological and other aspects of music, delivered by academics in non-academic setting.
Oragnised and curated by Radim Labuda et al
photo: Markéta Sasínová & les-woods.net