Rouzbeh Shadpey
In The Pathological Earwitness, Rouzbeh Shadpey builds a case against listening. Honing in on listening in its violent registers —where whiteness operates inaudibly to distort the suffering of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people — Shadpey works against discourses of listening that codify the act as one of inherent empathy and vulnerability towards the other. What emerges is a listening that operates as an organ of the white sensorium; a psychoacoustic technology of policing deployed within the medical-industrial complex and over the Mediterranean sea. Shadpey examines how weaponized listening is normalized by the discourses and practices of sound studies and sound art, where the aesthetic register of listening becomes readily separated from its historical and material conditions and consequences. Palliating this institutional impotence, Shadpey turns his ear beyond the sanctified realm of sound, uncovering alternative modes of listening within the fields of literature, visual art, film, and psychoanalysis.
"The earwitness makes no effort to look, but he hears all the better. He comes, halts, huddles unnoticed in a corner... hears whatever is to be heard, and moves away untouched and absent."
Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, musician, and writer with a doctorate in medicine and inexhaustible exhaustion. His work explores (de)colonial pathophysiologies of illness, with a focus on the aesthetics and poetics of neuroimaging, diagnostics, and fatigue. Rouzbeh's musical practice under the name GOLPESAR / گلپسر combines avant-garde electronics, scraped guitar, spoken word, and echoes of Iranian sonics. Rouzbeh has exhibited and performed at documenta fifteen, Mosaic Rooms, Centre Clark, MUTEK, Suoni Per Il Popolo, and more. His recent publications include Decolonial Hacker, Infrasonica, and revue Esse. He currently lives in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal.