A Soundwalk between Athens and Beirut - A conversation with Manolis Manousakis

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I have the chance to talk with Manolis Manousakis, a composer and sound designer based in Athens. With a passion for recording soundscapes and creating interactive audio documentaries, Manolis traveled to Lebanon to conduct a two-month research at Beirut Art Residency (BAR) as part of the Onassis AiR Exchange Residencies Program 2019/20. In this conversation, we will talk about his research into the soundscape of the city of Beirut and its people, as well as about his involvement with Medea Electronique collective and Koumaria Residency. On this occasion, we have also invited the Lebanese artist and sound designer Nour Sokhon in order to trace the parallels of the auditory experiences of Athens and Beirut.

Hello Manolis, welcome!

Hello, Myrto

For me, sound is everywhere around us, but sometimes we don't see it and we forget about it. I would like to start this discussion by asking you a very simple question, which is what is sound for you and how do you distinguish it from noise?

Well, sound is life and life is full of noise. Noise is part of sound. It's something that we don't really recognize in our everyday life. So, we tend to forget how noisy our life is. That's something very common between Athens and Beirut. If you want to talk about the common things that Athens and Beirut have is noise. Noise is not really a bad thing because you don't really realize that we live in a noisy environment. It's a behavioral thing. We behave and we express ourselves through noise. We drive fast, we use our cars, our devices, our voices, our music in a very loud manner because we tend to express ourselves in such a way. Noise doesn't really have characteristics. If you walk down the street, you can identify a car that passes in front of you and it's very loud, but this is not the only soundscape that you listen to. This is not the only noise that you listen to. Noise doesn't have a face most of the times. So, you don't really know who produces noise. It's a pollution, actually, that cannot really be identified as something that somebody does. At the same time, it's a pollution that if we all decide to stop and turn it off, to turn off every device, then this pollution can go away just like that. It's not like sea pollution or the sewage in the forest. It's a pollution that we can actually get rid of in a very simple way by changing our behavior. Through the quarantine we realized that in the big cities. I went to popular places that usually are very noisy and for example in the center of Athens in Syntagma and on Ermou street you could listen, neither to birds nor insects, but you would listen to the electricity. You could listen and record the electricity passing through the electric pillars. That was the sound of Athens.

I would never expect that.

You never really expect that and there it is. So after we leave, what do we leave back? In Maroussi, where I live, every morning was like visiting a forest. I had never imagined that the train that passes a kilometer away from my house was so loud or that the noisy environment of the suburbs is so high and now that everything was closed, it was like being in the middle of a forest. It was actually like being in Koumaria, which is a residency that we have in a small village. So, yes, sound is life.

While watching a previous talk that you did here at Onassis AiR, you were talking a lot about stories, about how we create our own stories through the sounds that we listen to. I think we can talk about this specifically and the project that you launched, but before doing that, I would like us to talk about your experience at the residency and your research there.

When I went to Beirut my plan was to go out and record interviews and sounds in the manner that I used to do in Athens, with the projects that we did with the Onassis Foundation in 2013, titled 'Soundscapes, Landscapes' and then again in 2015 and 2016, with the second part of 'Soundscapes, Landscapes' and the application 'My city, My sounds'. This is an application where you actually visit towns or cities or neighborhoods that somebody has added sounds and then you can visit that city in an auditory manner. You listen to the city in another way. We've done that in Athens -in Neos Kosmos, Gkazi, Metaxourgeio, and Kerameikos. We've done it in Crete, in Montreal, in Selasia, in Thessaloniki, in several different cities. So my initial idea for Beirut was to extend the cities that we were covering. So, I started recording my experiences there. The way you do it pretty much is like taking Polaroids. If you go to a city and you start shooting with a Polaroid camera, then what do you get? You get small events. You get small characteristic sounds that identify a behavior in a particular area. At the same time, you get interviews of people that live in that area. Beirut is a very vast place with many different sound sources, since we are talking about sound. The first and most obvious thing is that you listen to the traffic of Beirut, which is louder than the traffic of Athens, but I think we are heading there as well, slowly slowly. Then, you listen to -it might be a cliche- the mosques and the prayer. At the same time, though, you listen to the "esperinos", which is the Christian afternoon prayer as well from the Orthodox or Catholic churches, and that was unique. It was unique because I never imagined that these two elements can be so distinct and at the same time so unified in a city. That intrigued me a lot. So, I started the interviews as somebody who didn't really know Beirut or the history of Beirut asking what's the story behind it and why when you visit the center of Beirut, the Blue Mosque, plays exactly at the same time the prayer with St George, which stands exactly behind it. Then you learn about the Green Line and then you learn about the history of Beirut and slowly slowly you start asking the younger generation how this has affected their own lives. So, you make somehow of an auditory documentation of what life is now in Beirut and how this has affected the different generations and that's part of the sonic environment of Beirut at the same time.

How did you start this series of interviews there?

By walking! You just walk around. If you don't walk around and if you don't knock on doors and if you don't bother people and if you don't make friends, then you can't really get the samples that you need. Usually, when we do these projects in Athens they take about a year or a year and a half. In two months you just need to walk a lot. You need to visit a lot of places. We did a couple of workshops. That's where I met Nour, as well. Actually, I met Nour at a coffee shop. I didn't meet her at the workshop. I met Nour at the coffee shop 'Haven For Artists'. I was interviewing there -Nour is going to remind me her name because now I'm stuck- the girl who runs the foundation and Nour was just standing there and she was like, "oh, this is a sound artist and she might be very interested in working with you or she might be able to help you out". That's how we became friends with Nour and she started helping me out. She's a very good sound artist as well and I started meeting artists through the connections that all these people had. That was very interesting as well, meeting people that do the same thing with you in another place, in another area that is so close to Greece, but you don't really hear about it.

I remember that you mentioned at some point in the past that during the very first recording that you did in Beirut you lost everything.

Yes.

That's something that I think all the artists that work with technology and media must face at some point.

The day I landed, I met this fantastic photographer who actually took me to his father's land in the South. I don't remember the name of the place we were in. I just remember seeing tomatoes for hundreds of meters. It was at the valley and the first one I took was -actually I didn't really take it because I don't have it, but I tried to take- the mosques that started at 5:15 p.m. that evening and were playing a different prayer. It wasn't the same. It was different. I said, " it's not really the same". And he was like "well, it's not the same because they belong to different -I don't know how he explained it-, one was from from Saudi Arabia, the other one was influenced from Egypt, and they had these different prayers. It was very dystopic, whatever you were listening to. It was like a sound composition already made for you and I was lucky because I had my phone recording at the same time. So, the only recording that I have is 10 seconds from my phone and the rest I forgot to press record. I was never actually able to get a similar recording. So, I asked Ziad -Ziad Antar- to take me back there and we went back, but, I wasn't very lucky with it.

It's interesting from what we have been discussing so far. I understand that for you, who work a lot with sound, it's also something that includes another kind of sense. It's also the sense of the vision.

Well, what I did in the beginning, when I started this project, was that I used to take a picture or a small video of where I was placing the microphone. In the beginning, I started that because I wanted to have a visual representation of where I was, in order to remember it. So, I just remembered where I was, what I did and in this way I could archive the sound better. Slowly slowly, I gathered so much information about the places that I visited that it looked like a blog. So, I asked myself, "why don't I use it as a blog and maybe I can explain better how sounds represent that particular area at that particular time, see if it makes sense and maybe make some sound compositions around that area and use an optical element like a picture in order to justify better my cause". That's how I started. It's not that I have a camera. Everything was done with a phone and I still do everything with a phone, something that's very easy to take out of your pocket and just take a picture right there of where you are or a small video. So, I ended up with 50 or 60 videos in Beirut.

With your project, 'My city, My sounds', it's not only about your stories, but also about the stories that the participants of the application, the person who wants to use it, can interact with and can download the pieces or upload.

'My city, My sounds' is a platform, regardless of the visual elements that I did for my project, that hosts maps of different cities. Everybody can download the map of the city that they want to create the sound walk and do their own sound walk. So, we can have 10 sound walks in Beirut or however many people are interested in making. I think there are like four or five in Beirut. So 'My City, My Sounds', is an open platform created by ZKM, the Onassis Foundation and Medea Electronique in 2016-17 through 'Interfaces' program. It doesn't host videos. Ιt just hosts sound. You can upload some video files and archive them within the system, but it's a sound walk application. It's a tool for composers to create in a different way a sound composition of an area.

Have you gone back to these sounds that you recorded in Beirut? Do you do that?

Yes, a lot. I use them. I use them either in my professional work or I do sound designs with them. I like them a lot. It's like revisiting an old album and you want to see your friends from the vacation that you went in ten years ago in Santorini, let's say. It's the same thing with sound. At the same time, I use the sounds in my compositions and in my line of work, especially the traffic sounds, which are very vivid and other things, such as the markets.

Let's go to your work with Medea Electronique, which you founded. It's an artist collective with a quite multidisciplinary approach, but it has a focus on new media practices, as far as I understood. Can you tell us more about it? You're also running a residency.

Yes, we started in 2006 with our first work, which was called 'Medea Electronique Project One', that was actually inspired and based on Euripides's play Medea. Since then, we have produced several plays, workshops, live events, festivals. We run a noise music festival, which takes place online this year. It's a radio broadcast that happens the first week of each month and hosts 14-20 different noise artists from around the world that present new music. In 2009, we started hosting a residency in Koumaria, which is in Selasia, which is a village between Tripoli and Sparta at the foothill of Mount Parnonas. The region is called Koumaria. That's why the residency is called Koumaria. This is a multidisciplinary residency which hosts dancers, composers, video artists, theoreticians, philosophers, poets, writers, with the goal of creating collective artworks. It's been 11 years now and we hope that this year we'll be able to make it in October. We'll see.

The residency is a ten-day program. So, it's quite short.

It's short and intense, yes.

How did your perception about your residency changed after your participation in another residency?

Well, I went to a residency that nothing was done collectively except cleaning the house. It was very interesting because I had to wake up in the morning, contrary to what happens in Koumaria, and plan my own day, start creating by myself for my own project, where in practice till now I was just doing it collectively, either within Medea Electronique all these years or at the residency. So, that was very different and actually I enjoyed it a lot and I realized that maybe people that come to the residency sometimes need to.

To rest.

To rest and relax and it's not all about making things and waking up in the morning at 10 a.m. and having a production meeting and then doing art all day and then going somewhere else and doing another art project and performing every day and showcasing every day. But it's just a different way of running something. Maybe Koumaria is like a production bootcamp for contemporary arts, but at the same time there is very nice work created and like Nour, who was at the residency, there are very nice people coming and are very creative. Actually the residency is the residents. So, if they find the place that they can create, they're just going to create and produce work and more work that at the end will justify what the residency is about. It doesn't really matter if it's collective or if they do it by themselves. What matters is that you give them the tools to just do what they get inspired to do.

Perhaps now is the right time to bring in Nour, who is a sound designer from Beirut and who has also participated in your residency. You met in Lebanon for the first time. Is that correct?

Yes.

Welcome Nour!

Hey, Nour!

Hello

I have the port behind me.

I saw that.

How are things in Beirut?

Very strange, very strange. It's quite a strange time with COVID-19. It's like Greece. Now people stopped wearing their masks and there's still the revolution happening somehow.

OK.

It's strange times, but we're managing.

Nour, welcome to our discussion!

Thank you!

I'm very interested to hear how did you guys meet? Perhaps you could also tell us a bit more about how you met Manolis and what he did in Beirut.

I was at 'Haven For Artists'. There is a coffee shop there and also a residency space and I happened to have a meeting with somebody there that day and the founder, Dana, told me, "you should meet him, you guys would get along because you both do sound. Go talk to him." So, we spoke and I remember he told me that he wanted to interview someone that day. So, we went for a walk to try to check if the person he wanted to interview would be around or available after he interviewed Dana, which I found quite exciting, because I like this approach "do you want to just start making sound, recording things and researching?" I just thought, "yeah, of course, let's do it". It just started from there and then organically we just started doing more sound walks together.

Is it different for you to listen to your city through Manolis's work? Do you hear more sounds?

Well, I think the difference is that I personally don't know a lot of sound artists in Beirut or in Lebanon. I know a lot of electronic composers, musicians, but there aren't a lot of people here that I could go have a walk with and just listen. In terms of listening to the traffic, listening to the electricity, the other sounds in the city, the people talking, the noise. It's quite nice to share that listening experience with someone else as well and to interpret that and see, for instance, how he would consider composing it, turning that into a soundscape versus how I would do it. So for me, it was more that process of sharing the listening experience that I found to be quite interesting. I even remember when we would record sounds, when I put the recorder, the question was "how long do you stay recording the sounds for". It was interesting for me to also see how long he would choose to record something for. It's never usually two minutes, I have to say. That's quite cool. More material.

You've also had the experience of coming to Greece and participating in the residency.

Yes. The fact that there are artists and members from so many disciplines in a way gave me and the other artists that I collaborated with, including Manolis, an opportunity to have documentation, which is something I struggle with a lot as an artist, and to have a lot of archival material and different perspectives. Because even when we would go for walks the other artists would take pictures or record something and that allows for more opportunities for the work to grow. I found that pretty amazing because from all the residency experiences, I haven't had one as collaborative and as intense as Koumaria. I think that was a pretty amazing part of it. There's this kind of pressure in some way as an artist that every time you're creating work you have to do a lot of research and you're kind of attempting to create this masterpiece or this thing that's going to blow someone's mind. In this case, it was more about trying things, and when I was there at least I wasn't trying to create this best work of art, but I was just trying to explore my possibilities and to learn from the other residents and see how I could go or think in a different way within a limited amount of time. We had these discussions in the evening. They were also very helpful. We had very long days, but it just kept the creative juice flowing and kept me motivated and kept the other residents motivated. That was quite beautiful.

Through your exchange did you find some common things about the local scenes that you are part of -between Beirut and Athens-, a common thread?

I think the noise music scene of Beirut is a very vivid and very active scene, which reminded me of the scene in the beginning of 2000s in Greece with the small clubs that used to host this kind of music up to 2009-10, before the big foundations came in and found this kind of music and hosted it as well. That kind of scene is very active in Beirut, as it used to be in Athens, where it's not anymore, actually. So, that's something that I found very good. Actually, it's very good. I think it's one of the best noise scenes that I've heard, regardless of it being in the East. Beirut is a small place. Everything happens in one street and that works organically very well because, you know, on Monday you go to this bar that for an hour hosts a noise artist who plays as a DJ and then plays some noise elements and then you go to the other bar the next day and it plays something different and it's not just an underground bar, it's a cocktail bar or it's something that might offer a more hipster environment and some food and drinks. At the same time there is a small noise festival happening for a day or two. That doesn't really happen in Greece and I don't know if it happens anywhere else, actually, to tell you the truth. Because the noise scene is a scene that you now find within universities. It has become very academic. It has become very proper. It has become classic. In Beirut, it's still wild, noisy, naif and progressive. Actually, I talked about the similarities and the differences now with the West. Musically it is a very interesting area where you have all this chants and then tou have Arabic music, rock music and you have all these very talented people that play both instruments and electronics. They're very open more open than the rest of us in exploring different elements of music and mixing different elements of music without having a preconception of how they should sound. I think that's one of the main differences and you could see that from Noor coming to the residency, who was very open minded. The first day that she came, she actually grabbed the rest of the residents and said "why do we sit in the house, let's go outside" -that was day one- "and do something in that old tavern, let's recreate a project that had happened in the past there". That's how the residency started, without having any idea of what art should be. Let's just go out and do whatever and see where that leads us and I think that comes from Beirut a lot.

Since Manolis left Beirut, a lot has changed, talking about CORONA and the quarantine. I mean, for us here in Beirut and in Lebanon, the soundscape changed drastically even before CORONA came here. It changed since the revolution started, since October. Many places have been shutting down and opening up and shutting down and opening up. For instance, there's construction right next to my house and in Beirut you hear construction, you hear people screaming and honks. Since October 2019, it's like some parts of Beirut are completely empty and deserted and shut. There's one area where the sound is all concentrated, which would be where people are protesting. In downtown, for example.

I think sound might -not unify-, but might give you an idea of what happens in an area.

It documents.

It documents where different people live together, that might come from different backgrounds, and might have different religious backgrounds. You can get a unified voice now. How noisy this voice is and how contradictory it is, it is a different thing. It doesn't always end with a lullaby song.

Nour, did you also spend some time in Athens?

Approximately, two or three days, not very long.

What was the sound of Athens for you?

Athens is a lot bigger than Beirut. It is noisy, but not as dense as Beirut. All this to say that you could find a lot of things in one street in terms of what you want to see in one night. I mainly saw the typical places, like Exarcheia, and I found that we look very similar, the way that people move their hands, the way that they communicate. I didn't feel like I was in some foreign placeor somewhere I didn't understand. It's just the language that I was hearing that was completely different, but the body language was very similar and the way that people spoke, the loudness, was very similar as opposed to when I lived in the UK, for example, where loudness is considered aggressive. So, that gave me some kind of comfort.

Which is exactly actually, when you are from Greece, how you feel in Beirut. You can't really distinguish in Beirut. Nobody thought I was Greek. English is a second language for many of the people who live in Beirut -some people that are from Beirut, maybe Arabic is their second language-, because they have gone to a French school or an English school. It's very interesting. I don't think that somebody from Beirut would ever feel like a foreigner here or that a Greek would feel like a foreigner in Beirut.

It's very interesting.

We talk about Beirut, though, not Lebanon.

Yeah.

Since we're running out of time, I would like to ask one last question and perhaps we can close with a short excerpt from 'My City, My Sounds'. What is the weirdest sound that you found in Beirut or in Athens?

In Beirut? Do you want to go first for Athens, Nour?

Sure.

What is the weirdest sound of Athens? Well, it's a bit hard to answer.

Or the most interesting. Let's not say weird.

I have to be honest, most of my experience in Greece was Koumaria, not Athens.

That's OK.

I need to think about it because weird is something that I'm used to, so I don't really think that something is weird.

It was at the Bekaa Valley. I think that was the weirdest sound in Lebanon, at the Bekaa Valley, where I started recording the refugee camps. You listen to the frogs, you listen to the children running around and at the same time at the prayer. Again, the very first experience that I had in Beirut and that was one of the last ones. All these different mosques had at the same time the prayer and there were different prayers happening. Again, you're in a very dystopic place, something that is very alienated. The only thing that brings you back to reality is the children that laugh or the frogs. I was next to a creek and I never realized there were frogs there. I think that was the weirdest experience I had in Lebanon sonically and one of the most interesting was in Tripoli Dome, which is Niemeyer's unfinished Expo Center, where there is a theater that was never finished, but it has all these steel wires still hanging from the ceiling with immense reverberation where you can actually create whole pieces by banging at them or by walking around or by just breathing in the space. These two are things that I've never encountered before in my life recording in different cities all these years. I think these were the two most unique places and recordings I've made.

Nour, are you ready?

I can speak for Beirut. I can speak for Beirut, because when I was in Athens we were still in this state of Koumaria. It was more like me being surprised to go back to the city. That was the surprising thing. Going back to the sonic environment of the city, because we were in this parallel universe there and I believe the other sound artists that were with me felt the same thing. What is the strangest sound in Lebanon? I've also visited that dome and that was a very beautiful experience, but the strangest sound for me is the silence. Because in Beirut this experience of silence is very new and I'm constantly used to hearing so many layers of noise and attempting to distinguish all these different layers, but the silence somehow haunted me in a different way. When the silence began, I was able to hear the sound of the drones and the helicopters, during the quarantine, especially in the beginning, and I realized how not having noise could really affect someone psychologically when they're used to noise in the city, but hearing the sound of surveillance. It was quite difficult, but now the noise is coming back.

Thanks for sharing this.

Thank you for having me.

Manolis, to close the discussion would you pick a sound from the platform that we could listen to after we end the discussion? Which one would it be?

I think it would be the soundscape of Bekaa Valley.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you Nour!

Thank you.

Thank you both.

Bye.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations. Please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.