The City Talks Back Research Residency
This project concerns itself in Athens as a migrant-welcoming city, with asking how and where migrants are ‘heard’, and how the conditions of their being heard impacts their reception. Expanding on both the reduction of migration to a demographic fact, and the notion of the city as a site for the visibility of new citizens, we want to think about how and where migrants become an audible presence, or of course where they don’t and why. Bringing together urbanists, sociologists, and artists from Athens and elsewhere, we hope to reveal the character of vocal commons and undercommons in public spaces in the city. We will observe who speaks within them, social and legal constraints to access and noise-making, languages, sonic practices, and the ways their acoustics transform voices. Working with local groups, current conditions and problematics will be identified, to be responded to in the Interventions. In doing this, we aim to investigate Sassen’s assertion that the city remains a space for the powerless to make speech – what does this sound like in contemporary Athens, and where does it take place?
The research residency will involve a group of eight artists and researchers from Athens and elsewhere, invited to take part. Responding to the questions outlined below, participants will be free to develop individual outcomes or collaborate with other participants. In any case, the hope is that performative, spatial, and sociological approaches can cross-pollinate to offer a rich set of propositions and observations around the way architecture shapes the political voice in cities.
The residencies are aiming towards a Public Assembly at Onassis Stegi in June 2020 bringing together artistic and scholarly responses to the questions raised.