Zuzana Ernst

Zuzana Ernst, born in Bratislava, former Czechoslovakia, is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher and curator with a focus on community-oriented artistic practices and political, participatory cultural work, practicing at the intersection of scenography, performance and co-creative processes. After studying theater studies, architecture and scenography, she founded the transdisciplinary performance group tangent.COLLABORATIONS, which develops collective research-based projects. She is a founder and member of the board of trustees of D/Arts – Project Office for Diversity and was part of the artistic management team of Brunnenpassage ArtSocialSpace for many years, where she will continue to work as a curator.
In the Inter-University Doctoral School “Cultures in Transformation”, Zuzana Ernst is researching deep listening practices as relational and discrimination-critical strategies in the artistic process.

Dissertation project:
Scores for Making Oddkin – Deep Listening as Method for Emancipatory Practices in the Arts

First supervisor: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Lucia D’Errico (MOZ)
Second supervisor: Assoz. Prof. Dr. Ricarda Drüeke (PLUS)

This project listens for methods of relating that transcend entrenched disciplinary canons and claim a place for deep listening and critical listening positionality as political practices in the arts. Here, listening emerges not as passive reception but as active, ethical becoming – an instrument of oddkin-making, as Donna Haraway would have it, in which unlikely allies are invited into transformative relationships, attuned to one another by attentiveness and care. By positioning listening as a praxis of critical attunement, this work seeks to actively perceive marginalized perspectives that are often submerged within hegemonic systems. Thus, listening becomes a way of noticing the forces that shape who and what is heard, allowing power relations to shift and thereby potentially enabling new forms of relationship building.

The research engages with deep listening as a process that extends beyond auditory practices to include socio-political and ecological dimensions, foregrounding emancipatory practices in the arts sensitive to complex intersections of race, gender, class, ability and environmental contexts. From queer feminist composer Pauline Oliveros and her early sonic meditations – which fostered collaborative listening strategies – to other contemporary relational practices, this study collects and explores scores, interventions and gatherings that cultivate spaces of response-ability and becoming-with. I am interested in artistic practices that invite the listener to engage deeply and critically at the boundaries of perception and privilege. Building on critical listening positionality as described by Dylan Robinson – an interrogation of where we listen from, as bodies situated within histories, experiences, and biases – this project asks: What do we hear when we listen deeply and where are we listening from? Who are we listening with, and how do we avoid listening “hungrily,” greedily consuming or appropriating what does not belong to us?

By studying existing emancipatory artistic practices that intervene in dominant ways of knowing, I will expand on the questions: Who speaks and who listens? What are the (institutional) structures that we listen in? Who has what tools and capacities to articulate, in order to be listened to? These will in turn feed into my embodied research in form of listening laboratories bringing diverse actors together to test strategies that disrupt normative listening habits and explore tools for articulation of underheard narratives.

In tuning to listening as a method, the project crosses theory with practice, drawing on more than a decade of engagement in the field as an artist and curator in socially engaged arts, discrimination-critical cultural work, solidarity networks, and collaborations seeking to transform unjust structures in the arts. The research will build on my hands-on experience in co-creative methods developed in ongoing collaborations with artists and participants from diverse backgrounds, aiming to center voices from the margins. It is through this experience that I approach the practice of deep listening, listening within and through collectives, and sensing how such approaches may expand and critically inform this inquiry into the transformative potential of listening practices.