The School of the Listening Body

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“Lucía, your contribution was so insightful, timely, and critical. I deeply appreciated both the conversation and the performance. It was my first time experiencing listening so powerfully articulated as a methodology of resistance. It resonated deeply with me, and I know it also resonated with others in the room.”

Claudia Arana, curator of LAMAS, Latin American Media Arts Symposium 2026

The School of the Listening Body

The School of the Listening Body is an evolving poetic, artistic and pedagogical manifesto exploring a new educational model for a world that is not yet here, but is already coming into view.

It asks how we learn through relation, body, place and imagination, and how the body itself can function as a knowing tool whose capacities we have not yet fully discovered. The work develops what I think of as the inner workings of body technology: attention, perception, sensation, memory, intuition and responsiveness as ways of knowing, relating and communicating.

The writing and work move between poetry, manifesto, expressive arts, embodied practice, deep listening, improvisation, story, textile, movement, sound and creative media, treating these not as separate disciplines but as different ways of entering the same field of inquiry.

Poetry is one of its central forms. The poems hold contradiction, memory, body, ancestry, fear, desire, humour and the many layers of the self at once. One of the School’s ongoing poetic forms is the Listening: a live, situated reading practice in which a poem is offered within a particular place and moment, allowing weather, sound, bodies and environment to enter the work. Listening #2: Towards a Country with No Lies (Observations on Living in a World That’s All Eyes) was presented at Sweet Noises in the Field FESTIVAL in August 2026 in Eugenia Lake, Ontario.

Sound and radio also form part of the practice. The work uses voice, field recordings, sampling, playback, live electronics and radio style transmission, often combining recorded and live material. Radio has been part of my practice since early work in broadcasting and community radio, and continues to appear through voice, transmission, listening and sound composition.

The School also moves through ongoing artistic work. The Tuning Fork is a mixed media and sound piece in progress, bringing together prints, textiles, voice, recorded sound and material experimentation. Across these forms, the work asks how knowledge can be felt, remembered, sounded, carried, layered and transformed, and what becomes perceptible when we listen with more than our ears.

In October 2026, some of these questions entered a wider conversation through Echoes of Memory: Counter-Narratives in Digital Media Arts at the Latin American Media Arts Symposium, LAMAS, in Toronto, where I joined Laura Acosta and Santiago Tavera in a panel moderated by Victoria Carrasco. The conversation brought together questions of memory, technology, mediation, archives, embodiment and the ways contemporary media can carry alternative forms of knowledge.

The School continues to take form through poems, readings, workshops, the Living Arc of Learning, a manifesto, ten interconnected domains, sound works, performances and works still becoming. It is also a place where the different layers of who I am, artist, educator, therapist, listener, maker, body and memory, do not have to be separated from one another.

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To reimagine education is to rewild the mind.
To let the imagination grow roots and thorns and wings.
To remember that the future is seeded in how we listen now.