CLICK ANYWHERE TO
CREATE AN ECOSYSTEM
Every trace becomes part of the living world.KEEP CLICKING TO LET THE ECOSYSTEM GROW.
01 / THE IDEA
HOW DO WE
LISTEN IN A
WORLD FULL
OF NOISE?
The Listening began with a simple question: how often do we truly stop and pay attention?
Listening here means more than hearing sound. It means noticing a place, listening to people, holding onto memories and paying attention to things that are easily passed by.
Through art, music, workshops and immersive installations, The Listening creates space to slow down, become curious and express what we notice.
02 / THE ECOSYSTEM
NOTHING
LIVES
ALONE.
An ecosystem holds everything together: air, water, soil, fungi, plants, insects, animals and people.
A change within one part can travel through everything connected to it. The Listening explores this living network one subject at a time.
Our first edition is Birds. It will grow through research, community activities, music and collective making until it becomes a complete immersive installation.
The installation will not only show birds. It will follow the relationships that allow them to live, move, feed, nest and return.
One bird is never only one bird. Listen closely and an entire ecosystem begins to speak.
03 / FIELD NOTES
BIRDS,
CLIMATE AND
A CHANGING WORLD.
Birds move between trees, gardens, waterways, cities and countries.
Their presence, absence and changing behaviour can help us notice what is happening around them.
We are bringing bird research into conversation with recordings, public observations, memories and creative responses.
What we learn will guide the sound, music, materials, movement and stories inside the installation.
HAVE YOU NOTICED THE CHIFFCHAFF?
The little bird travelling with your cursor is a chiffchaff, one of the UK’s most widespread birds. It follows you through the website as a small companion, reminding us to look up, move lightly and remain curious.
Like the chiffchaff, we hope to travel between places, meeting people, learning from nature and carrying what we discover into new art.
THE WORK AS IT HAPPENS
A GROWING
FIELD RECORD.
Field Notes will hold photographs, recordings, workshop outcomes, material experiments and community contributions as the project develops.
After each activity, we will share a short impact report recording what happened, what we learned, what we used and what should change next.
04 / HOW IT SEEDED
CURIOSITY
BECAME A
COLLECTIVE.
The Listening was founded by Noufa Shabeer, an architect and creative practitioner based in Bristol.
“I started The Listening from a deep love of nature and the difficult feeling of watching it change. For a long time, climate anxiety left me wondering whether anything I could do would ever be enough. Making art became a way to stay with that feeling without becoming still.
I have always loved following questions and searching for solutions. Architecture taught me to study places closely and understand how they affect us. Art and music allowed me to carry the emotional part of that research into something people could enter, hear and feel.
I realised that protection does not begin only with information. It can begin with attention, familiarity and care. The Listening became a collective so that this care would not remain private or powerless. By bringing different people and skills together, we can turn it into something shared, visible and active.”
05 / JOIN US
BRING WHAT
YOU NOTICE.
You might be an artist, musician, ecologist, researcher, community group or simply someone curious about the world around you.
Bring a skill, memory, recording, question or idea. You do not need to arrive with a finished project, only a willingness to explore and create with others.