From February 27th to March 1st at STPLN in Malmö, and later from March 4th to March 7th at Red Door in Copenhagen, I conducted Poetic Consultations: Rituals of Listening, a durational artistic research project examining listening as a relational, ethical, and sensorial practice.
The project unfolded as an evolving environment shaped by poetry, sound, and care. Visitors were invited to slow their tempo: to move quietly through the space, to lie down, to listen… to disconnect from the noise of phones, artificial reality and virtual noise, and be present. Rather than presenting a static exhibition, the space functioned as a living laboratory in which encounters, performances, and moments of stillness continuously reshaped the work.
At the core of the project were one-on-one poetic consultations between myself—and individual participants. These consultations were grounded in principles of active listening, confidentiality, and attentional presence. Each encounter resulted in a typewritten poem composed as a direct response to the exchange. One copy was offered to the participant as a personal art object, while a second copy entered the exhibition anonymously, contributing to a growing constellation of voices reflecting on desire, memory, intimacy, vulnerability, and collective empathy.
Over the course of seven days across two countries, 41 poems were written.
Throughout each day, the space was periodically activated by live listening sessions with experimental musicians and sound artists: Dr. Hansen (sound tech), Noise Smith, So1System, Korana Jelaça, Christoffer Bagge, and Ignacio Córdoba. These interventions were not structured as concerts but as rituals of listening: durational sound environments in which audiences were invited to lie down, close their eyes, and engage sound as a shared, embodied practice. Music unfolded alongside silence and shifting sonic textures, allowing attention, duration, and receptivity to become perceptible materials within the space.
Sound functioned as a type of capsule, an environment that shaped the conditions under which reflection could emerge. In this sense, the project resonates with the proposition that listening is not simply a communicative skill but a transformative force. As the Bureau for Listening writes in Listening as Alchemy, listening can be understood as a process that can serve within as alchemy: “What if listening is not about understanding but about staying with what cannot yet be understood? What if its value lies not in clarity but in endurance? To listen is to practice patience in a culture of urgency. It is to resist the demand for immediate sense-making. It is to trust that relation itself is generative, even when outcomes remain unclear.ers states: of bodies under pressure, of relations shaped by power, of atmospheres thick with history.” Within the project, listening operated in precisely this way: not as the passive reception we are used to as the standard of our day while we are getting bombarded with information on a daily basis, but as a subtle reconfiguration of the relational field.
Initially, I understood the work as operating through two primary modes of listening.
The first was the intimate listening that occurred within the consultation itself: the encounter between participant and listener-poet. This listening was focused, confidential, and dialogical.
The second was collective listening: the shared experience of audiences lying together during the sonic rituals, attending to sound as a communal and embodied practice.
However, as the project unfolded, a third mode of listening gradually revealed itself.
After their consultations, participants remained in the space during the performances. They could hear, across the room, that I was typing the poem emerging from our conversation. While listening to the sound rituals, they entered a reflective temporal gap—a pause between speaking and receiving their poem.
Within this interval, another form of listening began to take shape: an inner listening.
Participants later described re-encountering their own words internally while lying in the sound environment. The performances seemed to create a suspended capsule of attention in which their earlier speech returned to them differently. Questions deepened. Memories reorganized themselves. Thoughts that had not surfaced during the consultation began to emerge. I wish you could see the relief their eyes reflected afterwards.
In retrospect, the sonic environment functioned as a kind of alchemical chamber for reflection. These listening rituals produced a sort of temporal shift. They extended the consultation beyond the moment of dialogue and opened a space in which participants could re-listen to themselves. This third listening was not directed outward toward the performer or toward me. It was internal, reflective, and recursive.
In this sense, Poetic Consultations: Rituals of Listening became less a project about producing poems and more an exploration of how listening reorganizes relational space. The poems were traces of that process rather than its final goal. The true material of the work was attention itself: how it circulates between bodies, how it shapes atmospheres, and how it allows unexpected forms of reflection to emerge.
Across seven days, two cities, six musicians, and forty-one poems, the project functioned as a small-scale laboratory for investigating listening as a practice of care, vulnerability, and relational transformation.
This research will continue to inform my upcoming performances, where listening will remain a central material—something to be practiced, tested, and unfolded collectively, something I dream of pursuing in a thorough artistic research format.
Meanwhile, for those interested in experiencing a poetic consultation themselves, private sessions (virtual or on-site) can now be booked here: https://calendly.com/madamneverstop/poetic-consultation
The experiment continues.
Love and poetry,
Madam Neverstop.
ELIZABETH TORRES 
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