The City Talks Back: Assembly 2 – Day 2

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)

SUNDAY 27.6

• 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 rumours.

Priestesses of Disgrace Act II is a live radio show composed of a conversation between the three artists with pre-recorded soundscapes from our 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 traveller emerges to listen to the voices on a crowded neighbourhood 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, Delays, 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, ‘Παγκόσμια Ηχώ | 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 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 neighbourhood 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 host an hour-long call-in show inviting the public to interact, share their opinions, or ask questions.

MONDAY 28.6 

• 00.00 – 24.00 – Ακούς την Αθήνα; | Do you hear Athens? – Fani Kostourou and Eleanna Santorinaiou

This piece from The City Talks Back: Assembly 1 is a 24-hour audio piece compiled from 101 field recordings from balconies in different neighbourhoods 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.

The City Talks Back: Assembly 2 – Part 1 

The City Talks Back: Assembly 2 – Film programme