Akoo-o | Onassis Foundation

Akoo-o is a group of artists and researchers that use sound and mobility as vehicles of expression and social inquiry. Departing from different fields -such as visual arts, cultural studies, musicology, anthropology, literature, sound design, music composition and performance – we share a common understanding of sound as a cultural material that transgresses the limits of our disciplines; at the same time, we consider walking to be a cultural-artistic practice that carves pathways between our own theoretical milieus and leads to meeting points with others. Our work is based on research and includes the process of collaboration in our artistic practice, through workshops and participative, creative collaborations. Since our meeting in 2013 we have worked on common projects and engaged in vivid discussions that involve our interest on sound, mapping, promenadology, the relation between the arts, technological mediation and the city.

Dana Papachristou is a musicologist and artist who focuses on the combination of arts through the use of new media. She has studied music (piano, clarinet, composition), musicology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Music Culture and Communication (an joint program between the Communication & Media Department and the Music Studies Department of the same university). She holds a PhD in the discipline of Philosophy of Art in regards to Deleuze and Guattari at Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis and the Ionian University. In the recent years she has participated in interdisciplinary research, music and geo-locative projects. She is a founding member of akoo.o collective. At the moment, she is teaching at the University of Thessaly in the dept. of Culture, Creative Media and Industries.

Yorgos Samantas is a social anthropologist engaged in sound, listening, and walking as cultural practices and as artistic media. His fields of interest range from urbanism and urban cultures, migration, and mental health, to the environment, acoustic ecology, and art institutions. Working on the field between art and anthropology, he seeks to expand anthropological knowledge production using a variety of media (sound, image, walking, mapping), while he grounds his artistic work in an ethnographically-informed social reality. He has been a member of art-and-social-sciences initiatives in Athens, Greece (“Fones”, akoo-o, “learning form documenta”), and is a member of TWIXTlab, a project between anthropology, contemporary art and everyday life. He works as a sound designer, educator, and occasionally a DJ. He is currently focused on a long-term research endeavor concerned with deaf audibility, sound art, and the radio.