Chamber Made – Listening Acts Installation

The space between making sound and hearing it holds intimacy and possibility. In this multidisciplinary experience, Chamber Made activates Melbourne Recital Centre for Now or Never with Listening Acts – a series of live music installations that explore listening and its role in memory, belonging and identity.   

Chamber Made invites you into stillness, and asks you to reflect on how we perceive, process, and hold sound – whether it be through ancestral memory, recording technologies, or the unexpected agency of everyday objects.

Grounded in the artists’ personal histories and diverse cultural perspectives, these works reveal listening as both solitary and collective – shaped by technology, and yet profoundly human. 

Each work invites audiences to consider, in different ways, what it is to listen. These experiences will be complemented by a trio of live performances, Listening Acts | Performance, offering fleeting yet powerful moments to surrender to the sound.

To experience all works in full, we recommend allowing approximately 60 minutes.

Commissioned by Now or Never. Listening Acts is supported by Creative Australia, City of Melbourne, and the University of Melbourne’s Science Gallery. Melbourne Chamber Made has multi-year, recurrent funding from Creative Australia, Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne, and is based at the Meat Market. Made possible by Chamber Made donors.  

Tamara Saulwick
Rebecca Bracewell
Hannah De Feyter
Anna Liebzeit
Monica Lim
Thembi Soddell 

Based on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Chamber Made cultivates adventurous multi-artform practice to disrupt and rewrite conventions of live performance. The company harnesses the momentum of our rapidly evolving world to make original works that defy categorisation and express something essential about our life and times. Interrogating the intersections of music, sound and contemporary performance, Chamber Made works speak directly to a 21st-century Australia enriched by the meeting and intersection of cultures. A commitment to collaboration, an appetite for innovation, and an ongoing fascination in the intersecting spaces between artforms drives them through their fourth decade.  

Led by Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick, who, as an acclaimed performance-maker and director with over 25 years’ experience, brings a deep knowledge of multi-artform collaborative practice. Since 1988, Chamber Made has been a leader in the creation of new Australian work, creating over 50 works and presenting over 100 performance seasons in Australia and internationally, which have been recognised with myriad national and international awards and nominations.