Archive

My Sound Art: Or the Attempt to Imagine Utopias?

Rui Chaves

OPEN CLASSES OF CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES_2025_26
NOVEMBER 12TH OF 2025, 5.30PM
ROOM 34 OF EP1 – ESAD.CR

In this presentation, Rui Chaves offers a reflection on his artistic practice as an artist, teacher, curator, and writer, exploring listening as a critical and imaginative gesture. His sound art asserts itself as a field in process—including his art-to-come—shaped between essay and performance, the everyday and fiction, desire and uncertainty. Taking listening as a way of inhabiting and thinking about territory, Chaves summons sound as a force of resistance and hope, capable of staging possible worlds. His work thus proposes to listen to the present in order to imagine shared futures.

Rui Chaves is a professor, artist, and researcher in the field of sound studies. His interests include performance, politics, and the archive. He holds a PhD in Music from Queen’s University Belfast (2013) and was a postdoctoral researcher at NuSom – Research Center for Sonology at the University of São Paulo. In 2019, he co-edited, with Fernando Iazzetta, Making it Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art (Bloomsbury). Since 2019, he has co-directed with Iazzetta the netlabel Berro. He was Visiting Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the Federal University of Paraíba (2020–2024). His artistic practice often involves poetic approaches that explore the relationship between sound, memory, and personal and collective narratives.