Drifts of the Rolling Listening Station
This project consists of a series of events held in various urban public spaces (streets, squares, parks, community centers, schools), based on community listening and reflection around issues related to urban life and citizenship, and engaging the community and its environment in a broad sense.
The selection of the sites where activities take place is linked to the cases identified in the catalog and arises from prior agreements with host institutions that will participate in each public presentation reached by the Rolling Listening Station.
The concept of the Rolling Listening Station is grounded in the reuse of a mobile device built by IF: a habitable trailer with multiple uses. This infrastructure, equipped for recording and listening, has been repurposed as a mobile radio, film set, and expanded field to fulfill new functions linked to different types of documentation and communication in the programmed drift of this project.
What is the Listening Station? Origins
The Listening Station is a small mobile infrastructure based on the act of listening. Since its inception, it has moved between the fields of art and healthcare. Initially designed for the community of the Francisco J. Muñiz Infectious Disease Hospital, it was conceived as a tribute to the enduring work of Dr. Paco Maglio, who coined the term “escuchatorio” from a perspective of doctor–patient relations rooted in empathy, acceptance, and truth.
Dr. Maglio was a leading figure in the field of infectious diseases and an important presence in his role as Chief of Intensive Care at the Muñiz Hospital, from where he laid the foundations of modern critical infectious disease care.
The Listening Station (Escuchatorio) emerged from a dialogue and collaborative work with members of the Muñiz Museum, particularly Tuti Maglio, who was also responsible for the hospital’s institutional relations. The Muñiz Museum has led many initiatives to integrate art into the realm of public health. Ten years after the creation of the Art Space located within the pharmacy where patients receive their daily medication, the Listening Station was launched to celebrate this anniversary.
It is a habitable module specifically designed and built to welcome the hospital community in a comfortable and sheltered environment, where individuals were invited to anonymously share their oral and written testimonies about their experiences at the hospital. Over several months, it gathered a collection of stories, sensations, desires, and testimonies of value on multiple levels.
This initiative actively sought to deepen the interconnections between art, society, and health, through mediations that foster feedback between these spheres, framed within medical anthropology and its appreciation of cultural actions.
As an artistic endeavor, it functioned as a relational experience, mediating through a micro-institutional interface to engage with a historical institution. From a documentary standpoint, it provided valuable material for healthcare professionals. Socially, it became a collective manifesto celebrating the power of listening through the diversity of voices united in one project.
The proposed action is based on listening as a capacity for recognizing others beyond imposed roles or the conditioning of how others perceive our ways of seeing the world.
To bring visibility to the project, a habitable trailer was built to be transported by vehicle. Externally, it is a weatherproof armored volume. Internally, it offers a space where visitors can feel safe and at ease.
A desk with seating enables handwritten testimony and houses the recording equipment. A minimal console and a single button allow participants to start and stop their voice recordings.
The collection and editing of the oral and written testimonies were featured in an installation at the VII Muñiz Hospital Congress, held at the Metropolitan Design Center from November 13–15, 2019. It became a renewed resource for health professionals, contributing to the broader discussions typical of medical specialty congresses. The listening module and its resulting testimonies have since been featured in multiple presentations and forums as a reference for rethinking the doctor–patient relationship and other related topics.
Project and Construction:
IF / Investigaciones del Futuro: a77 (Gustavo Dieguez and Lucas Gilardi) + CoZa (Roger Colom and Leonello Zambón).
Concept: Tuti Maglio. Buenos Aires, 2019.
