The City Talks Back: Assembly 2 – Day 1

The City Talks Back is a collaborative project initiated by London-based urban research organisation 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 2021, 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 3-day radio broadcast on Movement accompanied by two new films launched on Onassis Youtube Channel and backtalks.city.

RADIO PROGRAMME

(EEST – Athens time)

SATURDAY 26.6

• 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 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 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 – Ακούς την Αθήνα; Ένας διάλογος – Fani Kostourou, Eugenia Maragkou and Dimos Mamaloudis

Ακούς την Αθήνα; Ένας διάλογος is a performative reflection of Ακούς την Αθήνα; | Do you hear Athens? (piece from The City Talks Back: Assembly 1) 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 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.

The City Talks Back: Assembly 2 – Part 2
The City Talks Back: Assembly 2 – Film programme