The City Talks Back: Assembly 1

In 24 September 2020 Onassis Stegi and Theatrum Mundi will launch backtalks.city, the digital component to The City Talks Back.

As well as these permanent pieces, the site will act as a venue for live discussions and performances with a public program to be announced in early September.

backtalks.city, the digital space of "The City Talks Back", was designed by Athens-based graphic design studio Typical Organisation. The layout and identity of the site is designed to invoke the walls of Athens as a space of conflicting political speech in their own right. While the typography reflects the “official” language of street signs, the flexibility of the artists’ works as digital elements speak to the more chaotic, layered and multivalent nature of the political voices of Athenian walls. The site was edited by George Kafka and developed and built by Bracket.

Assembly-01 is the first public presentation of "The City Talks Back" and takes the form of an online exhibition on backtalks.city, a specially-designed microsite. The site will feature new works and scheduled performances by the invited residents and additional collaborators:

“her moon is a captured object” by Ella Finer is a composition circling a spoken text as it performs an “orbital translation” from English to Greek to English. The piece considers the relations, energies and frequencies of and between different cities and the people who inhabit them. The first piece published on talksback.city introduced the work with a performed text translated from English to Greek. An accompanying live performance completes the piece by translating the text back into English in September 30, at 20:00 Produced and performed in collaboration with Eirini Amanatidou and Gigi Argyropoulou.

“Lovesong Revolution” by Urok Shirhan is a sonic essay composed of political songs and sounds, which you can listen to on backtalks.city from 1 October onwards. While some of the sounds are explicitly political, expressing solidarity or speaking directly of struggle, other sounds are political only implicitly – or accidentally – politicized through their adaptation in contexts such as protests. It provokes important questions on political struggles intertwined with emotional turmoil, seeking out a place for heartbreak and exhaustion alongside courage and defiance.

“Priestess of disgrace, you bring joy into my life” by Mercedes Azpilicueta and Angeliki Tzortzakaki with Maria Sideri is a loose script informed by informal, overheard conversations between elderly women in Athenian public spaces. The piece will be performed with an intermingling of Greek and English voices, in October 2, at 20:00, accompanied by sounds derived from street recordings in Athens.

“Infrastructures for Voice” by John Bingham-Hall and Fani Kostourou is an essay laying out and developing Theatrum Mundi’s research on the political voice in urban contexts and will be available live in October 3, at midnight. It includes reflections on how the speech or language of a city is constituted, the infrastructures that produce voice and the role of the crowd in amplifying or silencing it.

“Becoming the City” by the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum is a video broadcast that presents the work of the Athens-based activist movement and their conceptions of active citizenship. It showcases perspectives from members of the team on citizenship, activism, art and the political voice – and how they are creating, building, and becoming the city. Available in 20 October, at 20:00.

Assembly-01 includes other projects which are already available online.

“vox populi vox dei” by Yorgos Samantas is a sound piece studying the rhythmic structure of political slogans and church bells in Greece. Based on Samantas’s extensive archive of field recordings of demonstrations and public political commemorations in Athens, the piece considers how communities can be constituted in sonic spaces through sounds and rhythms closely connected to the Greek national imagination.

“Athens Tessellation” is a project by Stefania Gyftopoulou and Mara Petra in collaboration with artists participating in Curing the Limbo, a refugee integration programme run by the City of Athens. The project explores the notion of home as experienced during lockdown by those for whom housing is insecure, uncertain or displaced. The photographic, video and music works are arranged in a series of thematic routes which run through Athens and beyond.

“Do you hear Athens?” by Fani Kostourou with Eleanna Santorinaiou is a 24-hour sound piece which explores the balcony as a threshold space between domestic and public spheres across the city. Stitched together from over 100 recordings made on balconies in neighborhoods throughout Athens, the piece will be broadcast in real time as part of "The City Talks Back" public program.

“Route One” by Tim Ward is an audiovisual piece built from field recordings and handheld video clips. It depicts a typical commuter journey from the Athenian suburbs into the center, recorded in parts just before and just after the city’s Covid-19 lockdown. Meditative and melancholic, Ward’s video responds to the disorienting effects of the global pandemic by turning inwards to the tools and technology with which he works.

“Echos-Monde | The World is Echo” by Tom Western is a series of videos remapping Athens through rhythms, relations, circles, circulations, and echoes. It finds its cartography through an imagined conversation between two poets – Édouard Glissant and Nicolas Calas – to make an Athens that sings long histories of movement, encounter, and exchange.

Theatrum Mundi is a research center concerned with the way urban design stages the public lives of cities. From bases in London and Paris it brings together an international network of collaborators from urbanism and the arts, as well as a team of designers, researchers and curators. Theatrum Mundi leads transdisciplinary projects that help expand the crafts of city-making, through backstage research and creative production as well as onstage events and publications.

Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese. “Voices of a City Market: An Ethnography.” Multilingual Matters, 2019.

Virginie Bobin, Bouchra Ouizguen, Blanca Calvo, Ion Munduate, Katarina Zdjelar, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. “In the Fabric of Voice: A Polyphonic Conversation.” Manifesta Journal 17: Future(s) of Cohabitation, 2014, 17–27.

Nikos Bubaris. “The Acoustic Phenomenon of ‘Cocktail Party’.” SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 3(3), 2013, 46–60.

Christina Dunbar-Hester. “Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism.” MIT Press, 2014.

bell hooks. “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.” South End Press, 1989.

Eleni Ikoniadou. “Fugitive Voices,” Prerecorded Presentation at the Theatrum Mundi colloquium “Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: Τhe Political Voice,” 13 December 2019, Paris.

&beyond (eds.). “Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: Τhe Political Voice.” Theatrum Mundi, 2020 (forthcoming).

Saskia Sassen. “Cities Help Us Hack Formal Power Systems.” Architecture and the Social Sciences. Springer, Cham, 2017, 3–11.

Saskia Sassen. “Does the City Have Speech?” Public Culture, 25 (2 70), 2013, 209–221.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Die Philosophin. 14(27), 2003, 42–58.

Stavros Stavrides. “Common Space: The City as Commons.” Zed Books Ltd., 2016.

Ioanna Theocharopoulou. “Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens.” Artifice Books on Architecture, 2017.

Nicos Trimikliniotis, Dimitris Parsanoglou, and Vassilis Tsianos. “Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City.” Springer, 2014.

Amanda Weidman. “Anthropology and Voice.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 2014, 37–51.

Tom Western. “Listening with Displacement: Sound, Citizenship, and Disruptive Representations of Migration.” Migration and Society, 3(1), 2020, 194–309.