Ambient Thought

"and every star will blaze to guide their spirits home" (Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni, 2025)   "and every star will blaze to guide their spirits home" is a sound piece imagined by Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni as a threshold time-space to welcome visitors to the third edition of The Listening Biennial. It is conceived as an extension to the Ambient Thought(s ) series but rather than f...

DELEUZE 100 YEARS A new episode of AMBIENT THOUGHT pays homage to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the occasion of his 100th birthday (1925-2025). In this cult seminar from the 1970s from the Revolutionary University of Vincennes (at the time he was writing "Mille Plateaux" with Félix Guattari), Deleuze leads us on a visionary journey into the concepts of molar and molecular multiplicities, bo...

Referring to the C amiñando (walking) proposition of artist Lygia Clark, based on the act of cutting along a moebius strip of paper, Brazilian psychoanalyst, theorist and art curator Suely Rolnik interrogates the inextricable play of familiar forms and emergent forces, the embrace of the uncanny and the importance of body knowing in decolonizing the unconscious and freeing subjectivity from the sh...

"Our infrastructure for life was relational not institutional. Our orientation for life was internationalist. We shared space and time with plant and animal nations." In this new episode of AMBIENT THOUGHT, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson leads us on a journey to experience the concept of resurgence through encounters with Mindemoya, Siguan and Nanab...

In this talk, drawing on examples ranging from pig farming practices in Denmark to Henry Ford's doomed Brazilian rubber plantation venture, Fordlandia, anthropologist Anna Tsing - author of "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" - argues for a need to apply a range of feminist approaches to recount and address the planetary disaster of what has becom...

In this slightly abridged version of a lecture given at the European Graduate School, philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes up and expands upon Deleuze's formulation of the work of art as "an act of resistance", relating it to his own theories of potentiality, disactivation and the inoperant. Returning once again to his singular reading of Aristotle and referring to the work and worklessness of Titian...

The first episode of Ambient Thought features an extract from a lecture given by artist and filmmaker Trin T. Minh-ha, “Between Dog and Wolf”. Through this "colour", entre chien et loup, she evokes the migrant self, boundaries and multiplicities, as well as the complex passage between feelings of identity and alterity experienced by those who struggle under the labels of exile, migrant or refugee....