The City Talks Back is a collaborative project initiated by London-based urban research centre Theatrum Mundi in partnership with Athens-based cultural foundation Onassis Stegi.
The City Talks Back brings together a group of architects, urbanists, activists, artists and anthropologists, in two creative research residencies in early 2020, to explore the political voices of contemporary Athens. Famed as the birthplace of the deliberative processes of modern democracy, Athens has experienced radical changes, movements and protests in recent times. The City Talks Back acts as a laboratory and a stage for a series of new texts, performances, and audio-visual pieces that reveal the ways the city and its inhabitants talk back.
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. It was designed by Athens-based graphic design studio Typical Organisation and edited by George Kafka. 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 developed and built by Bracket.
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