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‘As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard.’ - Pauline Oliveros

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In the direct vicinity of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, the past yells, the present whistles, and the future hums. Sound has a short-term memory here, each gust of wind wiping clean the previous note. If you listen carefully enough, what can you hear about its layered history? How does listening “affect what is sounding”?

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For the collection of the PdBA, Ricarda Denzer began by listening to the immediate surroundings of the building. Through on-site research, recording experiments, and collective listening sessions, the score Close Your Eyes and Listen – O took shape. For the score, participants gathered in the park across the street, covered their eyes with sleeping masks, and listened together. Through this simple gesture, birdsong, traffic, wind, footsteps, and distant voices surfaced through attention. Listening became a way of creating proximity, not only to place, but to what usually remains unheard.

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Building from this listening practice, Earwitnesses brings the Palais into conversation with a site in Innsbruck, now a public park on the former grounds of a National Socialist detention and forced labour camp at Reichenau. Almost nothing of its past remains beyond a few archaeological traces. Rather than narrating history, Denzer composed an audio piece that placed these locations in resonance, allowing sound to carry continuities of absence, violence, and erasure across space.

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For the piece, participants were asked to sound an O and then to draw it. Grounded in psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s idea of O, Earwitnesses approaches listening as a state of openness rather than understanding. Pauses, repetitions, and omissions are not gaps to be filled, but treated as facts. Listening becomes a way of staying with what emerges and fades. A form of witnessing that treats heritage not as something fixed, but as something alive, unstable, and asking for care.

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Guided by the vowel, fragmentary voices rise out of a muted sonic atmosphere, briefly taking up space before sinking back again. O appears, disappears, and returns. Always the same, yet constantly changing.