Convened by Maria Hupfield and Michael Nardone, this collaborative program combines the improvisational nature of performance art with readings and activations by invited respondents. Taking the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s program series The Score as a framing device and reference point, conversations between contributors to both Breaking Protocol and Aural Poetics will resonate between performance, intergenerational listening and convergences between the aural and oral.

Participants include Maria Hupfield, Peter Morin, Michael Nardone, Patrick Nickleson, Skeena Reece, Dylan Robinson, and Charlene Vickers with Claudia Fernandez, with closing remarks by Re’al Christian, VLC Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives, and Shelly Rosenblum, Curator of Academic Programs, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

How do artistic modes of call and response, transmission and reception, speaking and listening, open spaces for reciprocity and multiplicity? On the occasion of Breaking Protocol, a book by transdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield, and Aural Poetics, edited by Michael Nardone, this double book launch introduces the books as prompts for discussions of sound, art and cultural memory across an ecology of practices.

About the books
With written reflections, photo essays, scores, poetry and short stories, Breaking Protocol derives from Hupfield’s “Coffee Break” sessions—a series of conversations organized with the Vera List Center over Zoom during the pandemic, in which Hupfield invited international Indigenous performance artists to discuss their work, and who in turn invited other artists to join the conversations. In Aural Poetics, Nardone worked with composers, artists, poets and theorists to consider how “the domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices.”