Julian Rieken

With great interest we are learning how partners across the wider European Silk Road hemisphere are developing their own and independent research projects and artistic interventions.

They are articulating many new and valuable nuances and approaches in the context of responsible listening and the question, what kind of formats can advance these specific listening abilities beyond the concert or cultural organisation.

Julian Rieken is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Silk Road Symphony Orchestra, co-founder of SONIC TOMORROW and betterconcerts and former Artistic Director of the IMPULS Festival. His work sits at this intersection of artistic practice, criticial inquiry and social impact. Across his work, he focuses on how listening can be reconfigured as an ethical, political, and relational practice – one that moves beyond audience reception toward shared responsibility.

Asked about his practice in connection with listening, he answered: “Positioning sound as both a methodology and a political proposition, it can become a space for imagining otherwise and elsewhere. My work aims to mobilize sounding and listening as relational and reparative actions toward ecological and social empathy – reshaping our entanglements with the other, the silenced, and the more-than-human.”

Listening as a relational and situated practice has continued to shape Julian’s work this year, guiding his curatorial and artistic research across institutional, political and ecological contexts. In Madrid, he participated in the pedagogical programmes of the TBA21–Academy and the Institute for Postnatural Studies, situating his practice within broader critical ecological discourse and more-than-human perspectives, and was invited by the Goethe-Institut to collectively reflect on how institutions might listen differently in times of political division. These engagements included listening and sounding interventions at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens and Radio Relativa.

In the Netherlands, as part of his ongoing fellowship with Residenties in Utrecht, he hosted workshops with Hogeschool and HKU University of Arts, exploring listening-with a threatened forest as gestures of ecological solidarity, producing sound works and site-specific interventions, and investigating the politics of sound to move artistic practice from representation toward action. 

A Silent Keynote at the University Museum Utrecht reimagined disoursive formats as a horizontal space shared inquiry through silence and of collective attunement. These practices culminated in the curation of the exhibition Islands of Change at the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht, reflecting on how we can move beyond retreating from crisis, weaving local contexts into outward ripples of systemic transformation powerful enough to shift the tides.

Learning from these practices opens new dimensions of responsible listening and highlights how artistic research can contribute to institutional and ecological transformation.

Congratulations, Julian, for moving these urgent questions forward!

Learn more about Julian Riekens work at www.julianrieken.de  and on Instagram

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 Listening Intervention at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum Madrid, Photo: Julian Rieken 

Curatorial Tour through “Islands of Change” Exhibition at University Museum Utrecht, Credit: Lidy Ettema

Workshop on ecological empathy with Action Pyramid in Madrid Credit: Insitute for Postnatural Studies