Rewire 2023 invited critics, writers, artists, and researchers to contribute to the Rewire Reflections series of essays, interviews, and short reflections on the festival. How can one write about listening, and how can they translate or communicate the embodied experience of joining the festival? Which questions, performances, shared spaces, or conversations still linger on, and which are most important to return to?

During this pilot edition, participants were given the opportunity to interview artists or to reflect upon the festival’s music, context, and film programmes. The group discussed creative and critical approaches to writing about music and sound together with invited writers and curators, and continued their conversations by means of peer-to-peer feedback in the weeks following the festival. 

This first publication brings together contributions by Zehra Eekhout, Cara Farnan, Sofija Gugina, Victória Mazzone, Martin Osowski, and Valentina Vella. Through various modes of writing, as well as audio pieces and other experimental formats, the group invites you to engage with questions regarding embodied forms of listening; voice and field recording as carriers of history, decoloniality, and forms of representation; notions of presence; and more generally regarding how to reflect with and upon music both individually and collectively. 

Sharing Passed Time by Zehra Eekhout 

The voice is History by Cara Farnan

On Listening as Bodies by Sofija Gugina 

Notions of Presence by Victória Mazzone 

Overshadowing the Pulpit: A Conversation with Joe Rainey by Martin Osowski

The Pleasures and Agonies of a Fleshy Mirror by Valentina Vella

Please note: all features are part of the Rewire Reflections series which is an open platform for aspiring and early-career critics, writers, and researchers. All views or opinions represented in these features are personal and belong solely to the author.