Julian Rieken is an artist, curator, and researcher working at the intersection of experimental sound, critical ecologies, artistic research, and socially engaged artistic action. His work is grounded in listening as both methodology and political proposition. Guided by modes of collaboration, conviviality, and embodied inquiry, he deploys practices of ‘listening-with’ and ‘listening-otherwise’ to challenge extractive and anthropocentric modes of knowledge production.

Drawing on situated research and sonic fictions, he weaves together field-based inquiry, speculative narration, and poetic storytelling. He composes resonant environments, collective assemblies, and exhibitionary formats that function as sites of encounter, relating, and intervention rather than representation. Interlacing sonic experiences with sensory narratives and gentle gesturing, these works do not seek to speak for ecological or social conditions, but to listen alongside them – foregrounding solidarity and responsibility.

Emerging as performative rituals, guided walks, site-responsive interventions, and experimental radio, his artistic work invite audiences to engage with sound as a medium for ecological empathy and collective agency. Across his practices of curating, sounding, and critical inquiry, listening becomes a tool for cultivating ecological empathy, collective agency, and alternative ways of being in relation – inviting audiences to engage with sound as a medium through which other worlds, histories, imaginaries and futures might be sensed and rehearsed.