The City Talks Back: Assembly 2

The City Talks Back is a collaborative project initiated by London-based urban research organization Theatrum Mundi and hosted by Athens-based cultural foundation Onassis Stegi.

It brings together architects, urbanists, activists, artists and anthropologists to explore the political voices of contemporary Athens. The projects and pieces presented here aim to question who is (and isn’t) heard in the city and how the audibility of voices changes across its varying public spaces.

Following two residencies in January and March 2020, our world was turned upside down by the pandemic. The streets went quiet, but our homes became places for public speaking and listening. Prevented from gathering back together at Onassis Stegi, Assembly 1 of The City Talks Back took the form of a newly-commissioned online platform backtalks.city curated and edited by George Kafka, combining films, performances, sound essays and texts. Nearly a year later, in a still uncertain and distanced world, we gather together again to share performances, translations, films and discussions exploring the city’s political speech, in the form of a 2-day radio broadcast on Movement accompanied by two new films launched on backtalks.city.

SATURDAY 26.06

14:00 – 14:30
“Infrastructures for Voice” - Fani Kostourou and John Bingham-Hall

We speak. Whether with our voices, our hands or through technologies, speaking is inseparable from being human. So, when do our words become political? Politics can be in what we say, but it can also be in the places and ways in which we speak. The same words delivered from a pulpit or over a kitchen sink do not have the same meaning. This is the idea that cities have speech too – they translate what we say via their own language, each having a unique syntax made up of its particular configurations of spaces, cultures, infrastructures, and technologies.

Fani Kostourou and John Bingham-Hall will introduce the City Talks Back Assembly 2 with a series of provocations connecting the infrastructures and the performances that stage political speech.

14:30 – 15:00

“her moon is a captured object” – Ella Finer

“her moon is a captured object” is a composition circling a spoken text as it performs an ‘orbital translation’ from English to Greek and back to English in two stages. No simple return to the start: in circling, the text comes back changed – co-authored with its translators (Eirini Amanatidou and Gigi Argyropoulou), over-dubbed by their voices. Considering scales of relation, frequencies and energies of/in/between cities and the people connected to them, the text speaks a series of night thoughts about communicating across distance and difference, about movement and relation, about star-like rocks and language in flight.

For the radio mix, the composition turns again in orbit, with a translation by Angeliki Tzortzakaki cut to vinyl by Jem Finer. Two records playing the two Greek translations with interconnected compositions will be mixed live by Yorgos Samantas.

15:00 – 16:00

“And everywhere vibrations”: A roundtable with Ella Finer, Pamela Jordan, and Vibeke Mascini

Departing from the orbital translations of “her moon is a captured object,” in which a kind of inter-hearing of the earthly, the mythic and the cosmic is proposed as a way of listening to the city, Ella Finer is joined by architect and sensory archeologist Pamela Jordan and visual artist and writer Vibeke Mascini in a discussion about the implicit politics in sonic relationships to site, scientific-mystical sonorous bonds, infrasonic and inaudible frequencies.

16:00 – 17:30

Mix: “Staging vocalities” – John Bingham-Hall

John Bingham Hall, director of Theatrum Mundi, presents a half-an-hour-long show. From protest slogans, football chants, and stadium concerts to karaoke, MC battles, and a lone voice that sings through the silence. This show will explore the seductiveness, the collective madness and the power dynamics of song through its vocal configurations and relationships to the architectural spaces that stage them.

17:30 – 18:15

“Do you hear Athens? A dialogue”

- Fani Kostourou, Eugenia Maragkou, and Dimos Mamaloudis
«Ακούς την Αθήνα; Ένας διάλογος» is a performative reflection of “Do you hear Athens? A dialogue” based on sonic enactments, field recordings and sound composition. With an emphasis on the familiar and everyday sounds of the city of Athens, Fani Kostourou with performers Evgenia Maragkou and Dimos Mamaloudis will recite a text written by Eleanna Santorinaiou and Fani Kostourou drawing attention to the often-antagonistic acoustic relations between the domestic and public spheres. The work contemplates the idea that the unique sonic landscape of the city has sonically acculturated Athenians, subconsciously shaping how they use or project their own voices.

18:15 – 19:00

“Lovesong Revolution” – Urok Shirhan
Can a sound start a revolution? The Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974 is known to have been triggered by a love song aired on the radio. Eighteen days prior, “E Depois do Adeus” was performed by Paulo de Carvalho as Portugal’s submission for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Departing from this love song, this sound essay traverses other, more recent instances of public speech, bodies in the street, political songs and sounds. 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.

This piece thinks about the amplification of sound through embodiment, all while keeping in mind the following: Where can dissonance and dissidence be located within our own lives? Is there place in the public sphere for those unamplified voices inside our heads: the soft voices that speak of fear, doubt, powerlessness and precarity? Can the revolution include our heartbreak and exhaustion, as well as our courage and defiance?

Can a love song start a revolution?

19:00 – 20:00

“Lovesong Revolution”: A roundtable with Urok Shirhan, Rayya Badran, and Yorgos Samantas
Departing from the work “Lovesong Revolution,” Urok Shirhan invites Athens-based anthropologist Yorgos Samantas and Beirut-based writer Rayya Badran for a discussion on collective chants, echoes of protests, and the silences in between.

SUNDAY 27.06

14:00 – 14:30

“Priestesses of disgrace, you bring joy into my life” – Mercedes Azpilicueta, Angeliki Tzortzakaki, and Maria Sideri
“Priestesses of disgrace, you bring joy into my life” is a loose script developed between Athens and Amsterdam, first performed via backtalks.city. It is based on what Adriana Cavarero calls “the truth of the vocal.” In the piece, informal conversations, marked by the dramaturgy of everyday life in the rich urban fabric of Athens are turned into composition material for a chant that resonates with the city’s secrets and rumors.

“Priestesses of Disgrace Act II” is a live radio show composed of a conversation between the three artists with pre-recorded soundscapes from the artists’ residencies in Athens, and excerpts from the updated script; as well as music by women singers that have shaped a feminist voice identity in the cities of Athens and Buenos Aires.

14:30 – 15:00

“Route One: Delays” – Tim Ward
“Route One” follows a typical commuter journey around the Athens suburbs. A short car trip leads to a longer spell in the metro system before the traveler emerges to listen to the voices on a crowded neighborhood pavement. It is built entirely from field recordings and handheld video logs of such a journey, gathered in the very last days before the Covid-19 lockdown of March 2020 and during the reopening of May 2020. This live electronic performance builds on the work by using the physical creation of delays (via vintage tape loops) to explore memory, recollection and transformation.

15:00 – 16:00

“Circular Movements: Imagining an Anticolonial Athens”: A roundtable with Tom Western, Penelope Papailias, and George Mantzios

A radio conversation, an anticolonial imagination. This broadcast brings together members of the ‘Memory – Monuments’ working group of Decolonize Hellas, Penelope Papailias and George Mantzios, taking Tom Western’s piece from The City Talks Back Assembly 1 (Echos-Monde | The World is Echo’) as a jumping off point.

The piece is a remapping of Athens. It finds its cartography through an imagined conversation between Athenian poets and anticolonial theorists – who think in circles and circulations and make a musical language that sounds out the rhythms and relations of struggle. From this imaginary, an Athens emerges that sings long histories of movement, encounter, exchange.

The radio conversation runs with these circular movements, connecting histories that are mobile and migratory, and speaking an anticolonial Athens.

16:00 – 17:00

“A Loud Voice Never Dies” – Urok Shirhan
From Beirut, to Athens, to Beirut and back to Athens. “A Loud Voice Never Dies” is an essay commissioned by Beirut-based online publication The Derivative, based on the work “Lovesong Revolution” that was first published at backtalks.city. A broadcast of a Greek translation by Geli Mademli and recorded by Fani Kostourou is followed by a selection of political songs played by Urok Shirhan.

17:00 – 18:00

Athens 2021: On the possibility of sonic monuments – akoo.o (Yorgos Samantas, Nicos Bubaris, and Dana Papachristou)

What if monuments were made of sounds? How could practices and artefacts related to monumentality be formed when acoustic experience incites remembrance?

Experimenting with the format of audio papers, members of akoo.o group propose a framework for making sound monuments by bringing together material and symbolic aspects of sonic events with the politics of public space and of remembering. Typical genres of sonic monuments are proposed and discussed addressing aspects of temporality, materiality, narrativity, performativity and territoriality.

18:00 – 19:00

Mix: “Driving on Trion Ierarchon” - George Kafka

George Kafka, curator of the backtalks.city site, presents an hour-long mix comprising music overheard from cars passing his first floor flat on Trion Ierarchon; a busy road running through the central Athenian neighborhood of Petralona. Bringing together Greek folk, mainstream pop, a surprising amount of UK drill, and other genres from both Athens and further afield, the mix attempts to mould a typically fragmented, disparate and distributed part of the city’s sonic landscape into an artificially condensed form.

19:00 – 20:00

The City Talks Back group roundtable

Curators of The City Talks Back programme, John Bingham-Hall, Fani Kostourou and George Kafka will host an hour-long call-in show inviting the public to interact, share their opinions, or ask questions.

MONDAY 28.06

00:00 – 24:00

“Do you hear Athens?” - Fani Kostourou and Eleanna Santorinaiou
“Do you hear Athens?” is a 24-hour audio piece compiled from 101 field recordings from balconies in different neighborhoods of Athens in May and June 2020. The ethnography-based composition explores the balcony as a threshold space between the domestic and the public sphere across the city. It calls for a careful listening of the sounds of the city, which form its acoustic territory and shape the sound culture of its inhabitants. A full version of the piece will be launched and broadcasted over a night and day (24 hours) for a unique and immersive auditory experience.

Alongside the radio schedule at Movement, we will launch two new films at backtalks.city commissioned for Assembly 2.

SATURDAY 26.06

In Rehearsal and Conversation - SGYF Culture Circle
The SGYF Culture Circle is a gathering of people, activism, and creativity. They recognize culture as their most powerful tool in communicating with and belonging in the city. In this film, six musicians play a selection of songs and discuss cultural connections and commonalities.

Musicians: Hussain Badran, Manolis Christodoulou, Salman Duski, Elias Fachides, Kareem Kabbani, Becka Wolfe
Film directed and produced by Joe O’Connor and the SGYF Active Citizens Media Lab
Sound technician: Vaggelis Kritikos
Camera Operator: Angel Ballesteros Rodriguez

SUNDAY 27.06

“Athens Tessellation” - Stefania Gyftopoulou and Mara Petra with Curing the Limbo
Confinement and social distancing were considered by national authorities as an effective way to get this extraordinary global health crisis under control. In this context, ‘home’ appears as a shelter of relative security, a place of warmth and peace and as a substitute for increasingly inaccessible public spaces. But which homes?

In a new film based on the mapping project presented as part of Assembly 1, contributors of different nationalities and ethnicities open the doors to their homes, allowing us to engage with stories that lie hidden within Athenian apartments and neighborhoods.