This piece appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
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From October 3 to 13, 2019, Ecuador experienced a national strike called by the Indigenous movement and several social organizations after the government of Lenín Moreno announced the elimination of fuel subsidies through Decree 883. Those were days of intense repression and violence in the streets, especially in Quito. Eleven people were killed in the context of the protests—some in direct confrontations with security forces. More than 1,500 were injured and over 1,200 detained.
On October 11, in a nationally televised address, President Moreno invited leaders of the Indigenous movement—headed by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)—to a direct dialogue aimed at ending the strike. The following day, CONAIE responded that any dialogue about repealing the decree should be not only direct but public. That counterproposal, however, remained unresolved.
Despite the call for dialogue, on October 12, during a march led by women from Indigenous peoples and nationalities, the government imposed a total curfew in Quito beginning at 3:00 p.m. I remember how the news arrived late, through scattered text messages; the rumor spreading among those of us who moved along Avenida 12 de Octubre toward El Arbolito Park, an emblematic site of protest. I remember running to get home, sending messages to friends and acquaintances to find out where they were, listening on the radio to people searching for shelter because they could not return to their homes. Repression intensified that night, especially in areas where the Indigenous movement was concentrated.
To many people’s surprise, the following day—still under a state of emergency and a localized curfew—a dialogue between the government and Indigenous leaders was announced. I remember the sense of anticipation at something unusual: the dialogue would be broadcast live.
To many people’s surprise, the following day—still under a state of emergency and a localized curfew—a dialogue between the government and Indigenous leaders was announced. It would take place with mediators and observers, but without their intervention. I remember the sense of anticipation at something unusual: the dialogue would be broadcast live.
From the beginning of the strike, people spoke frequently of a media blockade. On social media, debates circulated about who was responsible for manipulation, bias, and misinformation. Community and independent media were crucial in expanding narratives about what was happening. Comparing broadcasts and opinion panels often felt like inhabiting parallel realities. That is why the public nature of the dialogue was so striking: at least for a moment, we would be watching and listening to the same thing—not just a single mediated version of events.
I have asked many people what they remember about that day—their emotions, impressions, reactions: What did they make of that gesture? Did it change the course of events? What was missing? What did they hear?
Some responses: “It was an example of freedom.” “It was incredible—the government looked terrible.” “I was skeptical—how much can really be said in a public dialogue?” “That felt like democracy.” “The dialogue was repetitive; it felt more like a performance.” “It was wild—I never thought something like that would be broadcast.” “I thought maybe now they would finally listen.” “The leaders didn’t say anything—they just kept saying no.”
I return often to that moment—to the recording, to conversations about how that public dialogue was perceived. I make note of small gestures from that night.
The broadcast allowed us to listen from somewhere else. It produced, at least briefly, a dislocation in how we had been perceiving events during those days. The dialogue began with a minute of silence to honor those who had been killed—an act of public recognition and mourning. Mediators asked both sides to listen despite their differences. The president and government representatives were presented alongside Indigenous leaders as authorities. At one point, someone asked that a woman speak, because women’s voices were necessary for peace. Miriam Cisneros, a leader from the Sarayaku people in the Amazon, said to Moreno: “I ask you to listen to us, Mr. President.” She later added, “Doesn’t it hurt you?”
After nearly two hours, the broadcast paused for another two hours before the results were announced: the decree would be repealed, and the protests would end.
What kinds of listening do we need to reorient meaning in moments of intense conflict?
That night has many layers, but it invites me, in particular, to think about listening:
What does it mean to make a dialogue direct and public?
Which conversations should take place that way?
Do we really listen to the same thing?
With what intention do we enter the act of listening?
What kinds of listening do we need to reorient meaning in moments of intense conflict?
That scene resonated strongly with questions I had while designing the collaborative podcast and sound-intervention project Crónicas al borde. Emerging from research on testimonial, poetic, and documentary strategies in nonfiction narratives about migration, the project began as an attempt to create listening devices capable of engaging the collective meaning of personal stories—to narrate transformations and their relation to contemporary sociopolitical debates.
Responses to the broadcast dialogue revealed the complexity of perception. Some celebrated the decision as democratic; others saw it as manipulative. Many approached the exchange only to confirm what they already believed. Polarization, in that sense, remained intact.
Still, there were multiple layers of listening in that scene: Who was listening? And to what?
During those days I was also reading philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. In Listening, he describes the act of listening as the search for a truth that is not immediately evident. “Shouldn’t truth ‘itself,’ as transitivity and incessant transition of a continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen?” he asks. Truth, he suggests, becomes less something that appears clearly before us and more something that resonates and fades into an echo deep within the body. Although the dialogue did not produce an identifiable truth, I keep wondering: what might that resonant truth have been?
During the national strikes of 2022 under Guillermo Lasso and of 2025 under the current government of Daniel Noboa—both responses to austerity measures and an increasingly precarious and violent reality—repression intensified. The strikes also lasted longer: 18 days in the first case and 31 in the second. No president returned to a negotiation table during those protests, and no dialogue was broadcast. The sounds of repression from the most recent strike still linger in the body. I return to that fragile moment of listening in the 2019 dialogue and wonder: What does it mean to listen when the very conditions of audibility are shaped by power and violence? What forms of listening can open, rather than close, the horizon of the commons?
Toward a Wild Listening Practice
Listening is a prerequisite for democratic relations. Voting is often associated with having a voice. We chant and shout slogans in marches so that they will be taken into account. Courts listen in order to deliver justice. To be heard is, in some way, to participate in shaping the commons. Yet opening a scene of speech or protest does not necessarily guarantee a willingness to listen. The relationship between power, sound, and listening is far more complex.
Today, technology increasingly allows us to choose what we hear amid the thicket of noise—the expanding effect of noise-canceling headphones—or else we enter cycles of algorithmic listening that segment what becomes audible to us. Forms of listening are learned.
To be heard is, in some way, to participate in shaping the commons.
At the same time, sound situates us. It reaches us, enters the body along the route of the cochlea, moves through us in its vibratory force. It reminds us that we are bodies in relation. Sound can also wound: sonic bombs in war, stun grenades in protests, sirens and the sounds of surveillance and control technologies. These are some of the soundscapes of growing authoritarianism, sustained as well through the control of media, microphones, and bots of disinformation.
But repertoires of resistance also resound. Recently, I have been thinking about the whistles used in neighborhoods across the United States to warn of the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and about the noisy vigils organized outside hotels to keep agents from sleeping. About protests across many places and times: shouts, chants, footsteps, declarations, and slogans. And also about the resonant and chosen silence used in sit-ins as a strategy of denunciation—silence not imposed by censorship, but deliberately enacted in order to avoid accusations of provocation from state security forces.
In Crónicas al borde, we are especially interested in exploring this world of sonic practices associated with resistance—experimenting with the entanglements that shape how we listen in order to build other kinds of relationships through that which places us in common, moves us, passes through us, or shakes us out of inertia. In our research-creation practice, we place at the center the question of listening not only as a way of approaching what is—or is not—perceived, but also as a way of making something audible or resonant.
In the book Acoustic Justice, sound artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle attends to the ways “the power of people is configured and reconfigured through a relationship to sound and audibility, to attunement, interruption, and the arrangements we make to hear something different as well as to hear differently.” He understands acoustic justice as a matter of “material processes and social practices oriented toward the construction of solidarity.” He situates it theoretically as a culture of generosity and civility with consequences for power, the economy of attention, and the organization of political life because it reshapes our sensibilities, orientations, and capacity to move toward other responses—whether imaginaries, relations, or assemblages.
This concept resonates with me because it gathers not only what we hear, but also our disposition to listen—and our willingness to be transformed by what we hear.
So what should we listen to, and whom? What would it mean to listen differently? How might we listen to contemporary forms of unease, as psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik suggests, in order to understand them as expressions of a threatened vital force calling for transformative action? How might we build research-creation methodologies oriented toward that form of justice?
I think of a wild listening practice—one opposed to the monoculture of power, attuned to the resonance of lo vital, that which sustains and animates life, and open to the exchanges necessary for its persistence. A wild listening practice is:
irreverent [not compliant]
disobedient [not subdued]
disruptive [not servile]
disorienting [not sedentary]
wayward [not stagnant]
critical [not domesticated]
Cristina Rivera Garza, in Escrituras geológicas (Geologic Writings), describes research as a “practice of imagination and care.” In that spirit, research is, for me, a matter of lending an ear—or imagining enabling devices for acts of transformative listening: listening to something different; listening to what has not yet been heard so that, as philosopher (and contributor to this issue) María del Rosario Acosta López suggests, we might investigate its grammar as a way of interrupting and undoing erasures, silences, and concealments; listening closely so that what once seemed unthinkable can appear as a crack through which other realities may be rehearsed.
“Desire is a question whose answer no one knows,” wrote the poet Luis Cernuda. I think of wild listening in the same way: a question whose answer no one knows—a movement through meanings taking shape collectively as a micropolitical practice. Because a question opens us to the expectation that something might arrive from elsewhere, pass through us, and allow us to change.
It is a thread in the thicket.
Read the rest of this article, available open access for a limited time.
Listen to the episodes of the podcast Crónicas al borde, “El mar de los sonidos sin nombre” and “Machángara: entre la cangahua y la arena”.
Giulianna Zambrano Murillo writes and produces sound-based narratives. She teaches literature and creative writing at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ, Ecuador. She also directs the collaborative podcast and sound-intervention project Crónicas al borde and co-directs the laboratory on thought-creation, pedagogies, and sociopolitical debates Arte+Activismos at USFQ.