The Listening Biennial 2025 ▪︎ Echoes of Defiance
The Belgrade edition of The Listening Biennial, Echoes of Defiance, emerges at a moment of profound uncertainty. In Serbia, citizens confront escalating repression: since December, students have blocked universities with persistent demands for justice and responsibility, while protests are met with beatings, intimidation, and a wide range of methods aimed at targeting, gaslighting, and moral panic. Professors and students are treated as criminals, families threatened, and communities subdued through fear, violence, and systemic injustice. In such conditions, even the possibility of holding this program remains precarious. The act of listening, under these circumstances, becomes urgent, not optional.
Since 2021, The Listening Biennial has sought to explore the transformative power of listening—ethically, politically, and collectively. Its third edition, On Third Listening, proposes a journey that embraces intimacy, interdependence, and the critical joy of collective worldings, while remaining attuned to the realities of political violence and civic struggle.
In Belgrade, the Biennial temporarily occupies the Podroom Gallery of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, gathering voices into a space where listening is envisioned as a radical act: a practice not of passive reception but of commitment, solidarity, and care. Furthermore, this initiative seeks to produce the conditions that allow previously unheard voices to be acknowledged, allowing polarities such as presence and absence, trauma and resilience, silence and defiance.
Through open microphones, participatory programs, readings, concerts, and shared testimonies, we aim to build a living archive of voices—documenting, reflecting, and amplifying the lived experiences of those resisting oppression. Listening here becomes an act of solidarity, defiance and survival performed in a space in between, where the conditions for mutual recognition, care, and collective transformation seem possible.
Accompanying program:
Sunday, August 31, 6pm
Opening night: inauguration of Open mic stage
Monday, September 1, 13-20 h
Open Mic
Tuesday, September 2, 13-20 h
Open Mic
Wednesday, September 3, 16-20 h
Durational Podcast Echoes of Defiance from 4 pm
Thursday, September 4
Closing of Open Mic stage
International program curators: Soledad García Saavedra, Alecia Neo, Suvani Suri
Artistic director: Brandon LaBelle
Associate directors: Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Pablo Torres Gómez
Curators of the Belgrade program: Bojana (S) Knežević, in collaboration with Vladimir Bjeličić
Logistics support / assistance: Vesna Trailović
Technical / media support: Podcast.rs
Visuals: Dragana B. Stevanović
Belgrade program contributors: TBA