We were a lot in our heads even if senses were opening and food was becoming a central way to relate. We were a lot in our theories, even if new practices started to emerge. But how it is when there is not even one language that we can share to communicate? Who is struggling to survive, to be seen, to have a voice?

Which sets of privileges needed to be acknowledged in order for us to even start looking around, inviting people in and attempt to be together?

In this new iteration of Free home University, we reorganized our modes of participation to take into account, work and align with communities of practices and community in the struggle.

A series of new investigations were set to critically reflect on the systems of oppression still predominant in our locality, and globally, in particular at the expenses of people of color, LGBTQI+ communities, migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers, and who had agency and who was denied of, but could have if we started working in that direction and offered an invitation.

How can we develop interconnections, co-initiate change, practice solidarity, and live together responsibly? How can we support the emergence of new constituencies?

Questioning became the mode. Questions in form of conversations, collaborations, embodied and shared spaces, inhabited in silence, traced in recording, heard during collective listening and sound walks.

The question that some how articulated further our how we want to live became what is the sound of freedom? And later what is the sound of justice. Because for sure we don’t want to live without that, and as it has said, “Until ALL of us is free, we can not be free”

We centered the learning process and the building of a collective dimension on the body, its wisdom, its space, its story (as everyone was new and came from very different back-grounds and understandings, and in certain cases we did not share a language). Moving together and dancing, outside of discourse, allowed for a certain togetherness to happen, besides and across differences. Focusing on sound and on the act of listening also allowed for stories to emerge in an organic way, without being prompted and for no other purpose than getting to know each other. In the same ways, other intuitive forms of co-creation, like cooking, hanging out with no specific goals, watching and commenting on films, days at the beach, derives, provided space for difficult conversations to be held.

The pedagogical methods of listening developed by Ultra-red, who organize at the intersection of sound art and politics, were illuminating tools, for their inner capacity to be site specific, oriented towards intergroup dialogues, and fundamentally self inquisitive. Ultra-red has worked, over the past twenty years, within and across a widely distributed network of communities mobilized in the struggles against racism, homophobia, rans-phobia, and poverty in relation to public housing, health, education, and migration.

Ultra-red’s processes of listening, dialogue and reflection, constructed, as a political action that contributes as well as challenges collective organizing and relationship, remained strongly grounded in a day-to-day pedagogy of care and affinity.

This chapter is a collage of letters, material, protocols and propositions that attempt to restitute the complex conversations and relationships that were weaved across the first gathering in July, the second one in October and a third one in December with different people participating, overlapping and trying to keep reflecting together even form remote and via email.

In July the group was invited to bring a ‘sound object’ responding to the question what is the sound of freedom. A sound object is a short recording, either found or created, that is context-specific. Ultra-red have described it as ‘a sound in a relationship to it being listened to’

Michael started with his own set of sound objects, based on historical and contemporary material from the House Ballroom Community, LGBTQI struggles, Act-up archives, you-tube videos of songs and vogue performances.

Then he asked:

—What did you see?

—What did you hear?

—What did you feel?

We went through this process in the form of a facilitated conversation.

Then we set to a visit to the apartments part of a protection program for refugees. The beginning was weird, the simply fact we were visiting, put them in the situation they had to tell us their story, as they probably did at the tribunal, with doctors or their social workers before, they had to perform being refugees. Thankfully the second part of the night a different dynamic started by making food together and it became a beautiful relaxed dinner, where everyone brought ingredients, recipes and divided in different teams in the different houses.

The next day, we invited them to come to our house in Ammirato Culture House and Michael called the circle and asked again: last night, what did you see what did you hear and what did you feel.

The visit of the night before became our sound object. The sharing was powerful.

Only later we listened to the sounds they had brought from their lives and localities, in a variety of forms, including the memory of a sound retold, singing in their native tongues, and presenting disparate visual and sonic elements. In this case, the answers of the 3 key questions were written down on a huge table covered by paper. We had to do that in a certain, pre fixed time allocated. We then put those posters on the wall. Later on, the day before departure, we spend some time with all the written material that kept being accumulated on the walls, and we tried to map where were we standing in relations to those questions, comments and intentions

The original meeting with the guys from Castri and also their ‘social workers’ from GUS/Sprar happened through both contacts pre-FHU July 2015 and from a visit to their shared house early in July. When folks went to their home in Castri, there was a serious talk of what does ‘an invite’ mean? What does it mean to be invited into someone’s shared house that has a context of both a migration journey for all who live there and a political dynamic that surrounds why people make that journey.

It was at a later meeting in July when we were asking some of the Castri guys to take part in a process of listening and reflection, that this key question was placed directly in the room to us – do you know why we left?

This was a moment of questioning of who we were both by the Castri guys and by ourselves.

- What do we want?

Our own delicate but hopefully clear response was that we sought to work together and neither to ask or take anyone’s story nor to place them or this story in box that reproduces these guys as only ‘migrants’, forever stuck with this mono-dimensional labeling. What we sought to work with was ‘the now’. Who sought to work together as an act of listening together towards understanding what solidarities can be brought to Castri, to Lecce and wider networks in Europe and also to ask the question of why solidarity and what is it when it is unconditional.

The ‘guys’, around their chosen sites of personal and bio-political relationship guided the Castri listening walk to the small town (work, health care, sites of memory, relaxation and togetherness). The other listening walk in Lecce was facilitated by Ultra-red through sites of struggle and history. Such walks place collectivity into the heart of those sites – what do you hear? The collective tries to listen to the past and the future.