Beginnings are magical.

The work of Giuseppe Penone is the only possible beginning to announce the birth of the Vuslat Foundation. The Listener is a monumental installation by leading artist Giuseppe Penone presented as a Special Event at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hashim Sarkis.

Responding to the theme of the Biennale Architettura 2021, How will we live together? Vuslat Foundation’s presentation, curated by Chus Martínez, opens a global conversation about how we can create spaces for listening in 21st-century society. The Listener presents Giuseppe Penone’s Idee di Pietra - Olmo (Ideas of Stone - Elm), a new edition of Penone’s widely celebrated series, an installation of an elm tree cradling a heavy stone between its branches, representing a symbolic prompt of the potential generous listener within each of us.

Why a tree? Because the tree holds the wisdom of listening as it has listened to the earth and all living beings for centuries. The Listener is an invitation to a moment of reflection on the vitality and magic of what listening to ourselves, others and nature can bring to our inner and outer worlds.

As a continuation of the debut project, the Vuslat Foundation organised the "Generous Listening Symposium". The object of the symposium was to frame generous listening within the context of art and architecture and to explore how these disciplines can be vital vehicles for listening, how listening is an imperative and integral component for each practice, and what kind of spatial arrangements are required for listening.

Speakers of the symposium included a keynote by artist Giuseppe Penone and talks with Chus Martinez, art historian, writer and curator-at-large at Vuslat Foundation; Vuslat Doğan Sabancı, Founder of Vuslat Foundation; Francesco Bergamo, an architect working sound ecology and contemporary sound practices; Hashim Sarkis, curator of Biennale Architettura 2021; İnci Eviner, contemporary artist; Kenann McKenzie, director of the Generous Listening and Dialogue (GLAD) Center at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life; and Caroline Jones, Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture at MIT.

Giuseppe Penone
Idee di Pietra - Olmo, 2008
Installation for Venice Architecture Biennial, 2021
Bronze, river stone, water
847 × 280 × 170 cm