The Quiet is Not Silent: A Workshop on Listening and Storytelling in Artistic Practice and Research with Petra Bauer
What does it mean to listen with care — to each other, to images, to the unsayable?
How do stories shift when we tell them otherwise, together?
Join artist and filmmaker Petra Bauer for a day-long workshop that explores listening not as a passive act, but as a method, an ethics, and a form of resistance. Titled The Quiet is Not Silent — a phrase borrowed from Tina Campt — the workshop will create space for shared listening, deep attention, and storytelling beyond the dominant voice.
Thinking through Walter Benjamin’s idea that “storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained,” the workshop asks what kinds of stories remain — or re-emerge — when we slow down, when we listen differently, when we repeat not to fix meaning, but to let it unfold.
Drawing on the writings of Tina Campt, Pauline Oliveros, Walter Benjamin, and Olivier Marboeuf, participants will move through a series of collective exercises — somatic tuning, sound walks, interrupted tales, and silent reimaginings of film. Together we will explore how listening can be a form of thinking, a method of making, and a way of being with others.
The workshop takes place alongside Bauer’s exhibition WE CALL YOU! Sisters! Mothers! Workers! , which brings together films from her series Looking for Jeanne. These works — rooted in feminist solidarity, collective resistance, and political listening — will form a subtle backdrop to our shared explorations.
This is not a technical workshop. Participants don’t need prior experience in sound, storytelling, or filmmaking. What’s asked is simply a willingness to be present, to be curious, and to listen — not for answers, but for openings.
Places are limited.
Participation is by EOI, with submissions closing on the Sunday the 13th of July. Reading material, schedule and details about what to bring will be shared with participants in advance.
Please also register for the 2025 Daphne Mayo Lecture: Who Holds the Story? Solidarity, Cinema, and the Spaces Between Words, which is a prelude to this workshop.
Petra Bauer is an artist, filmmaker and Professor in Film & Media with a responsibility for the Profile Area Art Technology and Materiality at the Stockholm University of the Arts. In her artistic practice and research, Bauer is interested in how we can approach film as a space for social and political explorations. Her work addresses how women organise, resist and refuse, using both aesthetics and politics. Bauer has formed long-term collaborations with several different feminist organisations including Southall Black Sisters in London, the sex worker led organisation SCOT-PEP, Edinburgh and The Women’s Centre in Tensta-Hjulsta, Stockholm. She was one of the initiators of the feminist platform k.ö.k (Women Desire Collectivity). In the last few years she has been working on a four part film series that takes the figure of Jeanne Dielman, a character in Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), as a point of departure. The latest film in this series is Fifteen zero three nineteenth of january two thousand sixteen, made in collaboration with Marius Dybwad. The film explores how everyday routines and gestures are transformed when a mother loses her child in the violence that has impacted the Swedish outskirts since the early 2000s. This film depicts the way a home can hold both mourning and resistance.
