HearSay Is About Possiblities
The spirit of "what if?" has propelled HearSay through 12 years of creating, curating and collaborating. From a gathering (tk) in 2014, to an international festival of 129 events and 900 people in 2019, to deep pandemic HomeFires in 2020, to the rewilding of 2026, HearSay has always been about the alchemy of audio possibilities explored in the magic mountain village of Kilfinane.
Audio creators and the community of Kilfinane started planting possibilities together in 2014. By 2019, HearSay had grown into the world’s most beloved audio arts festival. Making its home for four days in an Irish mountain village of 700 people, sound artists, documentarians and musicians shared a bounty of new works and special commissions, encounters and experiences in fields and lanes and locals’ living rooms. The deconsecrated church, the apple farm, the library, the sunken garden, the old convent… All became gathering places where friends old and new crossed a threshold and made magic together.
Meanwhile, our creative field was fast becoming an “audio industry”: intensive, extractive, unsustainable. Our audio ecosystems were subject to “dumb money", rapid industrialization, venture capitalization and almost as rapid retreat. We were impoverished by it. Unprecedented quantities of “content” available across “devices” and “platforms”, stifling the spirit of joyful what-if-ery for so many of us.
Rewilding focuses on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health by protecting core wild/wilderness areas, providing connectivity between such areas, and protecting or reintroducing highly interactive species. HearSay is an invitation to be part of the rewilding on an individual and audio community level, interacting and co-creating with artists beyond the immediate business of podcasting, beyond and away from the churn of "content".
HearSay is... No name badges, no powerpoints, no pitches. Instead, a wild collision of audio arts rooted in place, sustainable from the ground up, fertile with possibilities.
