By Morten Søndergaard

Abstract

This paper develops resonant citizenship as a curatorial and critical framework for Momentum Biennial Momentum 13: Between / Worlds – Resonant Ecologies (2025), arguing that listening can be curated as a civic technology rather than be treated as an aesthetic disposition. Extending my earlier figure of the sound citizen, I propose resonant citizenship as a more precise term for the situated civic competence cultivated through curatorial infrastructures of listening: procedures, thresholds, tempos, and access protocols. The paper operationalises this claim through four curatorial tactics—horizontal reorientation, distributed listening zones, interference/parasites, and silent agencies—read as epistemic moves that convert spectatorship into co-produced attention across human, infrastructural, and more-than-human actors. The theoretical argument braids Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of resonance with Bruno Latour’s politics of nature, supplemented by Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” and Michel Serres’s notion of the parasite, to position curating as an epistemic practice of composing relations and due process. Two case studies – Maia Urstad’s In the Unlikely Event of… and Jana Winderen’s here: this place – demonstrate how protocol, slowness, displacement, and site-based instructions render governance, background infrastructures, and more-than-human agencies as matters of common concern. Framed as a sonic epistemic laboratory, Momentum 13 extends exhibition-making toward infrastructural experimentation (listening windows, wayfinding-as-score, maintenance and access logics) as a response to a contemporary social listening deficit. The paper concludes by holding open critical questions about accountability in horizontality, fragmentation in distribution, and the ethics of curating interference and silence, proposing resonant citizenship as a situated competence for composing publics in precarious ecological times.

Introduction

Two encounters may serve as a threshold into MOMENTUM 13’s curatorial proposition. In Maia Urstad’s In the Unlikely Event of…, a shed overlooking field and fjord becomes a listening room for procedural speech: safety and emergency announcements detached from their transport infrastructures. In Jana Winderen’s here: this place, a bench and a protocol ask the visitor to stop and practise attention to the site’s existing acoustics. Together, the works crystallise the controlling idea of the biennial: listening can be curated as a civic competence, and curatorial infrastructures can redistribute audibility and responsibility in ecological crisis.

Where Urstad exposes governance as an audible infrastructure of address, Winderen returns the question to place: how can institutions make time, rest, and permission for listening, and for describing what otherwise remains background?

Both encounters are quiet. Neither attempts to overwhelm or persuade through spectacle. Yet together they crystallise an urgent question for contemporary curating: what if listening is not simply the medium of sound art, but a civic capacity that can be trained and redistributed? What if a biennial can function as a public apparatus for cultivating responsiveness to more-than-human worlds, and for exposing the infrastructural conditions through which some voices are amplified while others are silenced?

This article enters the broader discussion gathered under the heading of sonic citizenship, but its specific conceptual contribution is different. I do not use sonic citizenship here as a general synonym for public listening. Rather, I build from my earlier figure of the sound citizen – a curatorial role elicited through sonic participation in public space – and develop it into the more precise concept of resonant citizenship (.1) I introduce the term resonant citizenship to avoid two limitations in the language of citizenship when attached too directly to the sonic. First, “sonic citizenship” can imply a bounded subject position, as though citizenship were simply extended into the auditory domain. Second, it risks reproducing exclusionary assumptions tied to legal, national, or normative models of belonging. By contrast, resonant citizenship shifts emphasis from identity to relation: from who counts as a citizen to how shared worlds are composed through answerability, reciprocity, and infrastructural conditions of listening. In the argument that follows, the sound citizen names the operative figure or role staged within the exhibition, whereas resonant citizenship names the broader situated competence that curatorial infrastructures seek to cultivate and sustain.

The shift in emphasis matters. The term sonic citizenship can easily suggest that citizenship is merely extended into the auditory domain, or that listening alone is sufficient to ground civic belonging. By contrast, resonant citizenship places the emphasis on relation rather than identity: on answerability, reciprocity, and the infrastructural conditions under which shared worlds become perceptible and discussable. It preserves the sonic dimension of the argument while avoiding an overly exclusionary or legally coded understanding of citizenship. In this sense, resonant citizenship does not name a legal subject or a stable social category, but a situated and contestable competence for remaining in response within ecological, political, and more-than-human worlds. This clarification is especially important in a Scandinavian exhibition context such as Momentum 13, where assumptions about public space, access, trust, and institutional hospitality quietly shape what kinds of shared listening can be staged in the first place.

This article enters an existing discourse on sonic citizenship, rather than introducing the term anew. In the literature and in the framing of this special issue, sonic citizenship already names a field of inquiry concerned with how sound organizes belonging, civic participation, audibility, regulation, and exclusion. I therefore draw directly on Højlund, Vandsø and Breinbjerg’s account of sonic citizenship as a set of “messy and fragile negotiations with and through sound,” alongside Eun-Sung Kim’s analysis of sonic citizenship as a mode of public governance and Vincent Andrisani’s discussion of sound, space, and belonging (Højlund et.al., 2024; Kim, 2016; Andrisani, 2017). My intervention is not to displace that discourse, but to specify a particular emphasis within it. I retain the sound citizen as the name for a situationally elicited figure or role within the exhibition, but I introduce resonant citizenship to foreground the relational, infrastructural, and more-than-human dimensions of civic listening that are central to the present argument. In this sense, resonant citizenship is not a synonym for sonic citizenship, but my proposed development of it within a curatorial and ecological framework.

The distinction matters because my argument is less interested in citizenship as identity or juridical belonging than in citizenship as a situated competence of response, distributed across bodies, sites, protocols, infrastructures, and more-than-human actors.

The article has three aims. First, it clarifies how resonant citizenship differs from, yet is supported by, the earlier figure of the sound citizen. Second, it strengthens the connection between theory and curatorial praxis by treating Urstad and Winderen as focal works through which the curatorial tactics can be concretely analysed. Third, it situates the argument within scholarship on infrastructural and collective curating, and within the specific Scandinavian context in which MOMENTUM 13 unfolded. The argument is not that listening equals citizenship, but that citizenship is increasingly contested as the design of audibility.

1 From the sound citizen to resonant citizenship

At stake is an epistemic shift: from spectators to sound citizens; from reception to implied producers; from the representation of ecological entanglements to their situated enactment. Momentum 13 was designed as a distributed listening laboratory unfolding across five zones—City, Forest, Fjord, Jeløy, and Gallery. These zones were not neutral settings but methodological tools for exploring how sound art reconfigures public attention and ecological relations. Yet rather than treat them as mere spatial divisions, I read them as test sites for curatorial tactics that ask how listening can be reframed as a civic and ecological practice.

In this framework, the sound citizen is not a subject that exists prior to the exhibition, nor a universal model of democratic agency. It is an operative role elicited by curatorial arrangements that transform spectatorship into shared orientation. The figure names what happens at the level of situated encounter: when visitors are asked not merely to receive sound, but to dwell, compare, negotiate, and remain answerable to what they hear.

Resonant citizenship, by contrast, names the wider condition such exhibitions seek to cultivate. It is not identical with listening itself, nor with citizenship in the legal sense. Rather, it names a situated competence through which publics are composed by listening under specific infrastructural conditions: tempos, thresholds, access arrangements, protocols of participation, and forms of maintenance. Resonant citizenship is therefore less a legal identity than an acquired and fragile civic capacity, distributed across bodies, sites, institutions, and more-than-human actors. As I argue later, it emerges when curating makes mutual audibility more habitual, reveals infrastructures of mediation, and sustains response across difference. 

From these premises, the paper makes a practical claim: sound art exhibitions can function as civic technologies. They prototype conditions under which audiences become implied producers of public attention rather than passive consumers of culture. The implied producer, in turn, names the shift from reception to co-production in a situation where listening is performed with others and through infrastructures. Within the broader problematic of sonic citizenship, the present article therefore proposes resonant citizenship as a more precise term for the collective and infrastructural competence that curating can stage, test, and partially sustain.

2 Situating the sound citizen

This paper advances “the sound citizen” as its controlling idea and operative figure (2003, 2018). The term is deliberately double: sonic – concerned with how listening configures collective life – and healthy – resonant with Hartmut Rosa’s thought that social resonance is a criterion of a life well-lived. In both senses, citizenship becomes audible: not merely rights in the abstract, but the concrete capacities to hear and be heard, to attune, and to co-vibrate with places, publics, and more-than-human worlds. I call this expanded, practice-based condition a resonant citizenship. It is proposed as an antidote to a mounting social listening deficit: the erosion of attentional depth, dialogical reciprocity, and civic co-presence under platformized, metrics-driven media ecologies (Kittler, 1999; Guattari, 2000; Lanier, 2011). 

Two premises set the paper’s epistemic ground. First, that contemporary public life may be seen as distributed: it is composed across devices, infrastructures, and interfaces that pre-format what can be sensed, said, and shared. Under these conditions, listening is not a private virtue but an infrastructural reality: it is shaped by standards, protocols, spatial affordances, and habitual choreographies of attention. Second, exhibitionary spaces can be curated as acoustic infrastructures – not neutral containers for works, but worlding devices that redistribute the “heard,” stage new forms of collective agency, and situate bodies in generative relations of response and responsibility. 

From these premises, the paper makes a practical claim: sound art exhibitions can function as civic technologies (2) In my use of the concept ‘civic technologies’, I lean strongly towards critical STS and critical data studies pushing back against celebratory narratives by defining civic technologies through their politics of participation: who is made legible, who is excluded, what forms of surveillance or behavioural steering are introduced, and how “civic good” is institutionalised, commodified, or contested? In the context of this paper, civic technologies prototype conditions under which audiences become implied producers of the public sphere rather than passive consumers of culture: co-authors of meaning, participants in attention-ecologies, and performing a ‘resonant citizenship’. The “implied producer” – a figure I draw from my earlier research into post-internet publics – marks the shift from reception to co-production in a situation where listening is performed with others and through infrastructures (3)

Why deficit? Kittler’s diagnosis of the general digitalization of information – where “sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface” – identified an early trajectory toward attentional glitter and sensory flattening (Kittler, 1999). Lanier picks up the thread as “stone-faced” listening: a culture cloaked in nostalgic forms despite ubiquitous novelty (Lanier, 2011). Stiegler names the deeper pathology: a global attention deficit bound to the psychopolitics of contemporary capitalism (Stiegler, 2010). If we accept this horizon, then listening is not a soft metaphor; it is a political faculty under pressure, and curating becomes a design of conditions that counterprogram the deficit. 

In this sense, the sound citizen is not a subject inside the exhibition, but a role that a situated exhibition can elicit. The role is enacted when curatorial tactics transform spectatorship into shared orientation. Earlier projects and proposals – such as Sound Citizen in public space – already asked how urban listening could activate “citizens of the artwork,” reframing the plaza, the queue, the street as sites of acoustic deliberation rather than mere throughput. Building on that trajectory, the present argument turns to concrete tactics – horizontal reorientation, distributed listening zones, parasites and interference, and silent agencies – that recalibrate how publics are constituted acoustically.

To call an exhibition an infrastructure is to foreground its rules, latencies, thresholds, and frictions. Historic sonic infrastructures (like Schöffer’s Türme, 1970; Neuhaus’s Passages, 1973) showed how audiences, devices, and sites co-compose an aural topography that the listener “sets into motion” simply by moving through it. Their lesson is curatorial: audience and artist are citizens of the same system; what counts is the design of relations – standards, gateways, affordances – through which listening can become shared sense-making. 

This infrastructural curating also underwrites the ultra-local: a scale of attunement where micro-sites, community knowledge, and more-than-human actants (winds, cables, lichens, servers, tides) co-author the work. The ultra-local is not parochial; it is a relay: a way that exhibitions translate planetary urgencies into situated forms of encounter, thereby enabling Rosa’s resonance – contact that “answers back” and changes both sides. 

Methodologically, this paper proceeds by operationalizing curatorial tactics that cultivate resonant citizenship:

• Horizontal reorientation: composing lateral, non-hierarchical paths of attention so bodies share a plane of listening rather than face a single authoritative point. (This is resonance against ocularcentrism, and against extractive spectacle.) 
• Distributed listening zones: staging multiple concurrent centers—forest/fjord/city/gallery—so the public sphere is felt as a mesh of actants rather than a podium and crowd. 
• Interference and parasites: using sonic “noise” (in Serres’s sense) to reveal hidden infrastructures and re-route inherited orders—techniques of friction that make conventions audible and negotiable. 
• Silent agencies: curating the inaudible, the infra/ultra-sonic, the bureaucratic quiet of standards—so that the “background” becomes matter for collective reflection and care. 

Across these tactics, the figure of the sound citizen indexes a health of the body politic: a capacity to sustain attentional ecologies, to negotiate difference non-violently, to resonate across species and systems, and to convert audience time into civic time. In short, listening here is both epistemic and ethical: it is a way of knowing with others and a commitment to remain in response to what (and who) is present. 

The concept of the ‘implied producer’ reframes listening as cultural agency: distributed, relational, and infrastructural. This, I propose, is the epistemic ground of resonant citizenship as understood in this article: not citizenship in the legal sense, nor sonic citizenship as a general category, but a situated competence in which listening becomes a mode of civic participation in ecological and political worlds. Yet this raises a question: does the implied producer democratise cultural agency, or does it risk diffusing responsibility by making “everyone” a producer, thereby undermining the specificity of artistic intervention?

In the following, I will situate these claims through two case studies from the Momentum 13 Biennial. Of course, I already chose these cases curatorially as they became part of the Momentum 13, so with the risk of mistaking production poetics with a reception aesthetic mode (which is too reductive, in this case, since the work did not yet ‘exist’ as an entity that would make reception possible at the time of curation), the argument throughout is pragmatic-epistemic: exhibitions can be designed as resonance infrastructures that repair social listening not by prescribing meanings, but by enabling publics to practice attention together—across devices, across differences, across worlds.

3 Case study I: Maia Urstad’s In the Unlikely Event of… – preparedness, vulnerability, and infrastructural voice

Urstad’s In the Unlikely Event of… (Urstad, 2025) is installed in a provisional shed placed in an exposed landscape on a field above the Oslo Fjord. The visitor enters a confined listening space, sits, and receives an electroacoustic composition built from recordings gathered across years of travel: safety instructions, emergency announcements, and other procedural speech acts that govern bodies in transit. The work’s site-sensitivity is decisive. The shed is simultaneously shelter and exposure: it filters wind and ambient sound, shapes reverberation, and makes the visitor’s body an acoustic participant. In this setting, preparedness is no longer merely information; it becomes an audible arrangement of public life – of address, protection, and the promise that risk can be managed through protocol.

The installation’s physical simplicity makes infrastructure legible. The shed is a micro-architecture of audibility: it frames listening as a deliberate act, isolates certain frequencies, and turns the visitor’s body into an acoustic participant (breathing, shifting posture, sharing the bench). The work functions as both artwork and listening apparatus. In curatorial terms, it is a condensed infrastructure: a small, portable institution of listening, placed in the landscape to reframe what counts as public attention.

The work’s central “content” is not narrative but protocol. The safety announcement is an infrastructural voice: it governs bodies in transit, translating uncertainty into procedure. It is also parasitic in Michel Serres’ sense: it feeds on mobility systems (aviation, rail, sea travel) and becomes audible only because those systems exist (Serres, 2007). In Urstad’s shed, the announcement detaches from its functional context and becomes an object of reflective listening. This displacement is an interference that exposes governance as sonic form.

Politically, the displacement matters because preparedness scripts reveal a modern promise: that uncertainty can be converted into manageable procedure. Heard in a shed above the fjord, that promise becomes fragile. The listener can hear the mismatch between protocol and an ecological horizon where catastrophe is not exceptional but systemic. Resonant citizenship is trained as the ability to remain with that dissonance – to hear administrative voice as a political arrangement rather than neutral information.

Through Hartmut Rosa, the work can be read as a ’resonance trial’. The announcements touch the listener through familiarity: they evoke embodied memory (being on a plane, a ferry, a train) and the affective texture of being governed by voice. The listener answers back not by speaking but by re-attuning: comparing the announcement’s tone with the fjord’s presence, the wind’s fluctuation, the sense of being sheltered yet exposed. The circuit is transformative precisely because it is unresolved. The listener cannot return the announcement to its functional place and cannot stabilise the landscape as comforting “nature.”

This oscillation is a civic resource. It trains a public to remain with ambivalence rather than convert it into cynicism, panic, or passive consumption of crisis narratives. The work thus counters the social listening deficit by slowing down the procedural voice that usually passes as background and by asking the visitor to hear governance as an affective infrastructure. Resonant citizenship, in Urstad, is not a moral message; it is a trained sensitivity to how public life is mediated through sonic protocols.

Urstad’s work indeed performs horizontal reorientation. The shed does not present an object to be viewed; it stages a relation between listener and environment. Facing field and fjord, the visitor shares a plane with landscape rather than facing a cultural centre. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, procedural speech – typically peripheral – gains aesthetic and political relevance, and the landscape becomes an acoustic interlocutor.

This reorientation happening in Urstad’s work, I propose, has a direct link to citizenship. The announcement addresses an implied subject – the authorised traveller whose safety is managed by systems. Relocated to the shed, the address becomes perceptible as address: who is spoken to, who is protected, and who is excluded by language, class, and mobility regimes. Resonant citizenship is trained as an ability to hear public life as composed through protocols.

A situated critique is necessary. Preparedness protocols are not distributed evenly across bodies. The “traveller” addressed by the announcement is an implied subject assumed to be authorised to move, to understand the language, and to be protected by institutional systems. By making this voice central, the work can expose exclusions: who is not addressed, who is rendered suspicious, and who is disposable within mobility infrastructures. The shed becomes a forum for reflecting on these inequalities, precisely because it turns a functional voice into a sonic object of public attention.

This is also where a resonant citizenship occurs. The work trains listening, but the political question is whether listening is linked to obligations beyond the aesthetic encounter. The curatorial implication is that infrastructural works require accompanying protocols: contextual framing that makes exclusions discussable, and institutional willingness to treat the exhibition as a space for deliberation rather than only experience. Here, the sonic epistemic laboratory frame matters: the exhibition is a trial, not a conclusion.

4 Intervention I: Toward a first definition: Resonant citizenship

Resonant citizenship is the situated capacity to participate in shared worlds by listening in ways that redistribute attention, disclose infrastructures, and extend care across difference. It arises when:

1. Horizontality makes mutual audibility habitual rather than exceptional.
2. Distribution teaches that publics are plural and place-bound yet networked.
3. Interference trains negotiation and infrastructural critique as civic arts; and
4. Silent agencies cultivate maintenance, permission, and threshold ethics as shared responsibilities.

This citizenship is performed, not possessed. It is learned through choreographies of the ear and body rather than declarations. It is also resistant: by countering extractive spectacle and platformed distraction, it repairs the social listening deficit with concrete practices – how rooms are arranged, how sites are linked, how frictions are held, how silences are kept. Finally, it is more-than-human: the resonant citizen does not just hear other people; they hear places, organisms, and devices as co-participants whose agencies condition what publics can be.

If the modern museum once trained the eye to recognize canonical forms, a sound-centered exhibition can train the civic ear: to sense relation, hold tension, and convert presence into responsibility. That training – distributed across these four tactics – is the operative program of resonant citizenship.

a. Theoretical Grounds for Resonant Citizenship

This chapter articulates the theoretical armature for resonant citizenship by bringing Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of resonance into dialogue with Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature – and by treating curating as an epistemic practice that reorients the conditions under which knowledge, care, and collective agency are possible. The wager is simple: if, as Rosa argues, modernity’s core pathology lies in an accelerating world that renders subjects mute and worldless, and if, as Latour contends, political modernity has excluded non-human actors from legitimate deliberation, then listening – staged, trained, and infrastructurally supported through curatorial design – can become a medium through which worlds answer back and publics re-compose.

b. Rosa: Resonance against alienation

Rosa defines resonance as a relation to the world in which subjects and environments mutually “answer,” transforming each other without collapsing difference. Resonance is neither harmony nor consensus; it is a responsive circuit: being touched, giving an answer, and undergoing change. In this view, alienation results when the circuit is severed by acceleration, optimization, and instrumental control. Sound – and listening, specifically – figures centrally here because audition already presupposes exposure and co-variation: to hear is to be vibrationally affected by what is not oneself. Curatorial practices that slow, contour, and pluralize listening conditions therefore enact what Rosa calls the axes of resonance: horizontal (with others), diagonal (with things and practices), and vertical (with more-than-human or transcendent horizons).

The sound citizen becomes the agent capable of sustaining these axes in public – someone whose attention is cultivated so that encounter can modify them. This is a civic capacity because the responsive circuit is not a private feeling but a shared norm: the expectation that voices, places, and beings can and should answer back—and that institutions should be designed to let them.

c. Latour: Composing a common world

Latour’s Politics of Nature proposes replacing the modern Constitution – where Nature is external fact and Society the realm of values – with a collective that composes a common world through procedures of inclusion, testing, and representation. Legitimate politics, for Latour, is less a battle of pre-given interests than a careful due process in which candidates for existence – humans, animals, rivers, data centers, legal devices – are brought into a forum, equipped with spokespersons, and subjected to trials of relevance and compatibility.

Sonic reorientation fits this program. Listening is a mode of inclusion that gives presence to those who might otherwise remain in the background: the hum of infrastructure, the pressure of wind, the unlicensed chatter of devices, the temporalities of non-human life. To curate listening is to design the forum’s procedures: thresholds, placements, and protocols through which propositions (works, sites, beings) become perceivable and discussable. Where Rosa diagnoses a deficit of responsive relations, Latour furnishes the institutional imagination for how such relations can be politically staged and maintained.

d. Curating as epistemic practice

If we combine perspectives from Rosa and Latour, curating emerges not as ornament to knowledge but as knowledge’s choreography – a practical ordering of encounters that makes responsiveness and inclusion operable. This is epistemic in at least three senses:

1. Perceptual epistemics: the exhibition teaches how to know by arranging conditions of attention (attenuation of noise, spatial affordances, rhythms of approach).
2. Procedural epistemics: it invites publics to test claims - by moving, comparing, lingering, returning – so that knowing is performed rather than asserted.
3. Infrastructural epistemics: it exposes the supports (standards, maintenance, permissions) by which anything becomes audible, enabling critique and repair.

Under this framework, resonant citizenship names a public’s cultivated capacity to keep Rosa’s circuits alive while honoring Latour’s due process of composition. It is less an identity than an acquired competence distributed across bodies and infrastructures.

5  “Give Me a Laboratory…” – Momentum 13 as Sonic Epistemic Practice

Bruno Latour’s provocation—give me a laboratory and I will raise the world—captures the hinge on which Momentum 13 turns: the biennial is not a gallery of finished statements but a laboratory that composes the very conditions in which listening can become civic, ecological, and knowable as such. What Latour names in the sciences—the careful staging of procedures, instruments, spokespeople, and trials through which entities appear and are taken into account – here migrates to curatorial practice. Momentum’s five transitional zones (City, Forest, Fjord, Jeløy, Gallery) operate as connected “labs” where listening is method, equipment, and forum at once; they enact a politics of nature by bringing non-human and infrastructural actors into audibility and due process. In this sense, the biennial does not show the world – it raises a common world by making relations, thresholds, and responsibilities acoustically present. 

To call Momentum 13 a laboratory is to specify how hypotheses about attention are translated into procedures that the public can test. In the fjord and forest zones, for instance, works are timed to tides, winds, and dense vegetative canopies so that visitors learn temporalities that no wall text could deliver. Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller’s FOREST (for a thousand years…) layers martial echoes with organic sound, generating an encounter in which the audience must adjudicate competing claims of history and habitat; the piece functions like an experiment in composition, forcing a comparison between memory’s reverberations and the present forest’s living acoustics. Nearby, Jacob Kirkegaard’s The Grey Zone (Never-Where) folds anthropogenic radiation into a seemingly “natural” ambience, displacing the fiction of a neutral soundscape and replacing it with an evidentiary field in which contamination speaks. These works do not illustrate ecological entanglement; they stage the procedures through which it can be sensed, questioned, and shared. 

What makes the laboratory civic is its distribution beyond a single room. Electric Tide (Cable House Soundwalk) draws a line from shoreline breakers to the cable hums at Jeløy, instructing the body to notice correspondences across technological and littoral strata; the score extends the lab bench into the city’s pathways, teaching a comparative method of listening-in-motion. Brona Martin’s locative walk intensifies that technique by punctuating movement with designated “Echoes,” moments of micro-attention in which a breeze or a rustle becomes a finding rather than a background effect. The result is a pedagogy of relation: listeners learn to hold places together, to read across sites as if they were instruments tuned to one another. In Latourian terms, the “experiment” is portable and public; it depends on pathways, protocols, and the equipment of the everyday – phones, maps, pier boards, sandals – that render the world testable outside the lab’s door. 

At the scale of media infrastructure, the lab’s procedures involve interference rather than purification. Daniel Pflumm’s Breath foregrounds the pre-speech inhalations of newsreaders, turning a polished broadcast into a study in bodily mediation; respiration becomes a metronome of complicity and attention under post-post-capitalist rhythms. By sonifying what a format suppresses, the work exposes the conditions of audibility that govern public life. The same move occurs in Ralf Baecker’s The Collapse of a Microcosm, where microspeakers and photosensors accumulate sunlight as a sonic memory; here the instrument is the building’s exposure itself, translating diurnal light into tremor and tone to show how perception is always already infrastructural. In both cases, the lab result is not a conclusion but a capacity: the ear acquires literacy in the background systems that form it. 

Crucially, Momentum’s laboratory is ultra-local without being parochial. Tulle Ruth’s roundSOUNDabout rewires a functioning roundabout into a community instrument, aligning vehicular flows with commissioned sound works. Instead of isolating art from daily life, the piece recruits circulation itself as experimental apparatus, converting a traffic technology into a resonant commons. The installation exemplifies the biennial’s horizontal reorientation: there is no frontal stage, only a field of mutual audibility in which drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians become implied producers of a sonic public. This is Latour’s politics of nature at street level: ordinary infrastructures acquire the status of participants and, with them, a new accountability for how attention is organized. 

The laboratory also extends into the domain of more-than-human address. Works such as FOAM – Sonic Allegories and Jana Winderen’s fjord writings relocate authorship to the interface of sea-foam, phytoplankton, ferries, and seasonal changes; human perception arrives as a latecomer that must learn the site’s tempo. In Rosa’s terms, resonance appears when the world answers back and the listener is changed; in Latour’s, composition gains legitimacy when procedures allow new actors to speak and be heard. Sound becomes the medium in which these two demands – responsive transformation and procedural inclusion—meet and hold. 

Even playful pieces operate as method. Takuro Oshima’s My DTM lets toy trains drag magnetic tape across playback heads, so that “music” emerges from collisions, couplings, and glitches; the audience co-orchestrates a delicate equilibrium between control and contingency. The lab lesson is practical and political: to listen is to negotiate interference rather than fantasize its removal, to accept that public attention is a dynamic composite of human and non-human rhythms. In the same key, Annie Mahtani’s Within the Silence and AGF’s #extinctionstories transform hush and testimony into obligations; silence ceases to be an aesthetic ideal and becomes a ledger of permissions, energies, and losses that must be acknowledged and re-distributed. 

Momentum’s reader makes explicit that the curatorial frame is inseparable from infrastructural experimentation. Wayfinding operates as score rather than signage; listening windows synchronize dispersed places; backstage labour is audited in public through maintenance logs and energy budgets; access measures (captioning, induction loops, tactile translations) are deployed as constitutional guarantees of audibility, not afterthoughts. A laboratory raises the world, Latour reminds us, by mobilizing allies and stabilizing chains of reference; here, those allies include caretakers, tides, HVAC systems, ferries, and the municipal timetable. By drawing them into the circuit, the exhibition becomes a civic technology for composing attention across difference. 

What emerges is a synthesis of the premises developed earlier. Resonant citizenship requires Rosa’s responsive circuits – the felt change that occurs when one truly listens – and Latour’s due process—the visible procedures by which heterogeneous beings are admitted and made consequential. Momentum 13 binds the two by turning sound art into a laboratory of survival. In precarious times, listening is not consolation at the edge of politics; it is the very medium through which thresholds are detected, conflicts negotiated without erasure, and obligations attached to the infrastructures that sustain life. The biennial’s wager is that if you give curating a laboratory, it will not only raise an exhibition; it will raise a world in which listening counts, publicly and durably, as a way of living together. 

6 Curatorial tactics as epistemic moves – case study II: Jana Winderen here: this place (2025)

Listening-with, more-than-human address, and the ethics of slowness

Winderen’s here: this place (2025) contributed to MOMENTUM 13 through a bench and a listening exercise. Rather than delivering a sonic object, it offers a protocol: stop, sit, and practise attention to what is already sounding. The bench changes posture and tempo, makes lingering socially permissible, and frames a duration that does not require visual payoff. The visitor becomes the medium through which silent agencies—wind, small sounds, distant infrastructures—can appear as candidates for collective perception.

As an infrastructural gesture, the bench is decisive. It alters posture and tempo; it makes lingering socially permissible; it frames a listening duration that does not have to be justified by visual payoff. In this way, here: this place operationalises silent agencies: it foregrounds the background by giving it a support structure (the bench) and a method (the exercise). The work stages the sound citizen not as a consumer of content but as a practitioner of attention.

Placed within the biennial’s distributed zones, Winderen’s work functions as a methodological hinge. It teaches a comparative method of listening across sites: once the visitor has practised “here,” they can carry the method to another “here” (forest, city, fjord, gallery) and begin to sense how different infrastructures and ecologies co-compose audibility. The work thus participates directly in the sonic epistemic laboratory: it is not a statement to be decoded, but an instrument for producing situated knowledge.

Latour is instructive here. The bench operates like laboratory equipment in the open: it stabilises attention so that entities can appear and be described. What appears is not only “nature” but a composite of human and non-human actants that make the site what it is. The visitor becomes, temporarily, a spokesperson by learning to report-from-within rather than judge-from-above.

Winderen’s piece trains an ethics of presence. It refuses the fantasy that one can “capture” a place; it asks instead for attunement, patience and situated humility. Haraway’s staying with the trouble is relevant: the visitor is asked to remain with the site’s complexity without turning it into an image of ecological innocence (Haraway, 2016). The work therefore resists both dystopian despair and pastoral consolation. It trains responsiveness without promising reconciliation.

This matters civically. Ecological crisis is often mediated through spectacular images and distant data. Here: this place counteracts that mediation by training local, embodied attention: the ability to sense that the common world is not elsewhere. Resonant citizenship, in Winderen, is an ethics of slowness that resists acceleration and attention capture not by withdrawal but by reorienting the visitor toward obligations of presence. The sound citizen here is one who learns to stay with sonic detail as a form of care.

The bench is also a device of care. It assumes bodies that need support; it invites rest; it enables different forms of access to listening. Yet it also raises questions: who feels entitled to sit, to occupy time, to be still in public space? The work’s apparent neutrality can conceal social differences. This is why silent agencies must be coupled with explicit accessibility and hospitality protocols—measures that make lingering possible for more than the already-privileged.

Politically, the work foregrounds the infrastructural conditions of quiet. Silence is not a natural given; it is produced by regulations, distances, land use, and social norms. By making “listening to place” the work, Winderen politicises quiet: it asks what it takes to sustain spaces where more-than-human agencies can be heard, and whose interests are served when environments are either quieted or sonically exploited. Resonant citizenship becomes an ability to perceive these conditions and to treat them as matters of common concern.

Winderen’s work intervenes in the distribution of the sensible by treating the low-level, non-spectacular sonic environment as worthy of collective attention (Rancière, 2004). It challenges the hierarchy that equates public culture with loudness, visibility and eventfulness. The public, here, is not a crowd around an object; it is a dispersed set of listeners who share a method and a commitment to compare and communicate across sites.

This reframes citizenship. Rather than imagining the citizen as a speaker in a forum, the work imagines citizenship as the capacity to let others – human and more-than-human – enter perception and thus become candidates for care and deliberation. The curatorial task is to make that capacity durable: to provide not only benches and exercises, but also channels for sharing, contestation and institutional learning. Without such channels, the listening exercise risks becoming private mindfulness. With them, it becomes a civic practice.

In this way, the biennial responds to a cultural condition: the social listening deficit wrought by attention capture, media saturation, and infrastructural opacity. Against stone-faced listening (Lanier) and the “glitter” of digitized senses (Kittler, 1999), Momentum’s sonic infrastructures reactivate audience agency: not by retreating to sanctuaries of purity but by enframing noisy, indeterminate publics where listening’s labor becomes tangible. Works such as Mogens Jacobsen’s Razz Ring (Hertzian Herd Healing) literalize our networked porosity, converting smartphone emissions into collective tonality without lapsing into surveillance aesthetics—a small proof that interference can be metabolized into civic form.

Haraway’s sentence returns as a score instruction: let resonance trouble boundaries. When resonance detunes ownership; when reorientation unseats the view from above; when parasites teach attention rather than cynicism, when reassembly expands the demos – then resonant citizenship names more than metaphor. It names a practice of living across thresholds with ears trained for friction. Momentum 13 does not resolve zones into one world; it resounds between worlds so that citizens – human and otherwise – can learn to navigate the gaps together. 

7 From emancipated spectator to sound citizen

Momentum 13 demonstrated that audiences of sound art can no longer be conceived within the passive frame of spectatorship. The emancipated spectator is free to interpret; the sound citizen is called to participate, to inhabit resonant ecologies, and to assume a civic role in the politics of listening.

The case studies suggest that the sound citizen, as an operative figure elicited by curatorial design, is not a passive recipient but a co-actor in shaping public attention and public space through listening.. Yet they also point to a tension: how can curatorial frameworks balance the emancipatory potential of participation with the risk of instrumentalising audiences as mere “co-producers” of artistic labour?

The figure of the sound citizen emerges through situated participation in sound art events in public space. This type of citizen embodies a critical transdisciplinarity, not merely as a passive recipient of sonic events, but as an active co-creator who influences and reshapes the artwork through interpretive engagement. The implied producer is integral to understanding this participatory dynamic. The implied producer refers to an invisible yet critical authorial presence whose intentions subtly frame audience perceptions, guiding listeners towards interpretive and affective responses (Søndergaard, 2016). Thus, in the framework proposed here, resonant citizenship involves not just receiving sound, but actively interpreting, comparing, and responding within a socio-political and more-than-human field structured by protocols, access conditions, and infrastructures.

Here, the notion of the 'social listening deficit' may help to describe the erosion of attentive, critical listening under the impact of digital media proliferation (Søndergaard, 2025b). This deficit indicates a cultural condition where the pervasive, superficial consumption of mediated sound dulls the critical auditory faculties essential for civic engagement. Brandon LaBelle further elaborates on this, proposing acoustic justice as a necessary response to such deficits. Acoustic justice foregrounds listening as a political act, emphasizing the redistribution of sonic attention towards marginalized voices and overlooked acoustic environments (LaBelle, 2020).

sonic citizenship already offers an important field for thinking audibility, belonging, and negotiation; my term resonant citizenship develops one specific emphasis within that field, namely answerability, infrastructural mediation, and more-than-human relation. It reveals the epistemic gaps of the social fabric of western societies. Felix Guattari’s three ecologies – mental, social, and environmental—resonate with this perspective, suggesting that sound art fosters interconnected ecological awareness across personal, communal, and environmental levels (Guattari, 2000). The listening, ‘resonant’ citizen engages not only with the artwork but with broader ecological resonances, understanding their role within complex systemic interactions. In fact, a more inclusive term for the citizens not excluded would be ‘resonant citizenship’. 

8 Resonant citizenship

The argument developed here is not that listening equals citizenship, but that citizenship is increasingly contested as the design of audibility: who gets time, thresholds, and procedures for being heard, and how those procedures hold across contested, more-than-human worlds. Resonant citizenship names this as a situated competence rather than a legal identity – cultivated when curating composes the infrastructural conditions of attention (tempos, access, thresholds, maintenance, and protocols of participation) and thereby shifts visitors from spectators to implied producers of public attention.

The four tactics specify how this competence is trained. Horizontal reorientation makes mutual audibility and lateral co-presence the default. Distributed listening zones pluralise the public sphere as a mesh of sites and actants rather than a single address. Interference/parasites render mediation and infrastructural priorities audible by introducing friction that must be negotiated. Silent agencies foreground the background – standards, permissions, maintenance, and the quiet labor that sustains audibility – as matters of care and accountability.

The two case studies demonstrate that these are not metaphors but curatorial operations. Urstad’s displaced procedural speech makes governance audible as an infrastructure of address, training attention to protocol, vulnerability, and exclusion. Winderen’s bench-and-protocol turns slowness, posture, and permission-to-linger into equipment for listening-with, allowing place and background infrastructures to appear as candidates for shared description. In this way, the biennial functions as a sonic epistemic laboratory: it tests whether resonance can be made durable through procedures of composition and response.

9 Concluding remarks

This paper has treated Momentum Biennial as more than an exhibitionary container for sound works: it has proposed the biennial as a sonic epistemic laboratory – a designed situation in which curating composes the conditions of public attention (procedures, thresholds, tempos, access, maintenance) rather than merely staging objects for interpretation. The key conceptual move is to shift from listening as private aesthetic disposition to listening as civic-ecological competence, operationalised through four tactics – horizontal reorientation, distributed listening zones, interference/parasites, and silent agencies – that re-script the visitor as an implied producer of audibility and responsibility. 

The two case studies sharpen what is otherwise at risk of remaining a high-level tactical vocabulary. In Maia Urstad’s shed installation, infrastructural voice (preparedness protocols, procedural speech) is displaced into a vulnerable site where governance becomes audible as governance: the work trains resonant citizenship as the capacity to stay with the mismatch between protocol and systemic ecological precarity – an exposure that is affective, spatial, and political at once. In Jana Winderen’s bench-and-protocol, the “work” is not a sonic object but a method of attention: slowness, posture, permission to linger, and the revaluation of background become equipment for letting more-than-human and infrastructural actants appear as candidates for shared description. Together, these cases do what the paper’s theoretical braid requires: they show how Hartmut Rosa’s “answerability” and Bruno Latour’s “due process of composition” can be made curatorially operative as training regimes rather than metaphors. 

At the same time, the paper’s strongest claim – resonant citizenship as a situated competence rather than a legal identity – also opens its most consequential critical tasks. First, horizontality can diffuse responsibility unless paired with explicit procedures of accountability: who sets the listening rules, who maintains them, and how can they be contested? Second, distribution can become fragmentation unless the “mesh” is made legible as shared civic time (synchronised windows, repeatable scores, channels for reporting and disagreement). Third, interference and silence can slip into aestheticised austerity unless materially tied to labor, access, and governance (standards, energy budgets, care work, permissions, exclusions). Here the paper is right to keep the synthesis open: resonance without procedure risks sentiment; procedure without resonance risks technocracy – but the harder point is that both can still fail if they do not confront asymmetries of mobility, language, class, disability, and legitimacy in public space, especially in the Scandinavian context that tacitly underwrites the “shared world” being tested. 

A productive way to end, then, is not with a celebratory summary but with a program of pressure-tests that follow directly from your own framework:

• From “implied producer” to accountable participation: specify which obligations can reasonably be placed on audiences.
• From “citizenship” to situated publics: name the political and social conditions the laboratory presupposes and treat transferability as an empirical question.
• From tactics to evidence: propose indicators that do not collapse into metrics.
• From more-than-human inclusion to representation: clarify how non-human actants “count” without romanticisation – through spokespersons, proxies, protocols, and contestable curatorial decisions.

In this way, the “sound citizen” is clearly operationalised as a figure/role and resonant citizenship as a collective competence. The paper foregrounds the “sound citizen” as the situationally elicited role (micro-level choreography), and “resonant citizenship” as the institutionally sustained condition (macro-level durability). That distinction tightens the conceptual hierarchy and keeps the paper from feeling, as the reviewer notes, “overwhelmed by a wide array of interrelated concepts.” 

If the paper’s wager is that sound art curating is central to the politics of attention, the concluding claim can be stated with maximal critical sobriety: Momentum 13 demonstrates not that listening is citizenship, but that citizenship is increasingly fought over as the design of audibility – over who gets time, space, thresholds, and procedures for being heard, including the more-than-human. The task ahead is to make such resonance infrastructures durable and contestable – so that the laboratory does not end as an exceptional event but leaves behind transferable procedural knowledge about how publics can be composed without being captured.

• 1

  The concept of resonant citizenship is developed here from a specifically Scandinavian exhibition context shaped by public trust, welfare infrastructures, relative access to shared space, and particular traditions of ecological and civic culture. Its transferability should therefore be treated as an open question rather than assumed in advance.

• 2

  The term ’civic technologies’ is understood as a field of socio-technical interventions oriented toward public life (Zhang et.al, 2022). 

• 3

  This paper re-explores the notion of the ’sound citizen’ (Søndergaard 2003, 2015, 2016) – the unprepared audience of sound art in public spaces, which are affected and in turn affect the artwork itself. The central question is what characterizes the role of the ‘sound citizen’, and how this role is reflecting on the situation and constitution of the ‘distributed public sphere’? In the 1960s, the ‘modern’ public sphere was defined as a ’citizen sphere’ constituted by a resonating (and socially shared) literary awareness – weaving laws, newspapers, textualizations of thought into everyday habits (Habermas, 52-70).