Acts of listening: Score for sonic placemaking

Tsonami Arte Sonoro (Chile), Tuned City (Germany), Onassis Cultural Centre Athens (Greece)

Like we walk pathways across green-fields (because they are shorter) - the planned city is just a highly constructed abstract. Every day citizens perform synchronised routines of elaborate moves on public surfaces. Through the simple act of walking in the city, we log into a system of rules and constraints, codes that regulate the circulation of citizens within urban space. Such regulations are nothing but conventions, but they persuade human beings to act. “Acts of Listening” analyses these codes, amplifies and re-applies them in a certain environment. The project probes the vital role of the artistic production which has the ability to occupy spaces, provoke new and different models of playing the city beyond the officially intended use – or just walk a new line of score in the green.
 
A group of artists from Europe and South America are invited to reflect on sound as a contextual phenomenon of urban space, a battlefield of territorial disputes involving a number of cultural, political and economic interests, Valparaíso being a critical example of speculation in the city’s symbolic and physical territory. The same group travels to Greece. Based on the research and results of the working process in Valparaiso, the methods, ideas and choreographies will be applied, adjusted and proofed towards the context of a complete different idea of a city. Coming from the experiences in a lively urban environment into the remains of a so called ‘ideal city’, from a grown city structure with typical South American flavour to the culturally overload birthplace of city planning in Hippodamian sense, but now just an empty place – the contrast could not be bigger. But especially that makes the challenge. Underneath the well preserved city structure of the ancient place it becomes very clear that it was Hippodamus greatest achievement: recognizing that urban planning was about more than engineering a functional city. It was about creating an environment that expressed and nurtured the ideals of its citizens.
 

Concept: Carsten Stabenow, Fernando Godoy | With: Sebastian Jatz, Nicolas Spencer, Alejandra Perez, Leonel Vazquez, Florian Tuercke, Franziska Windisch, Maria Papadomanolaki | Urbanist: Rene Rissland | Project Management: Paola Ruz, Theodora Bougiouka | Funded by: the International Co-production Fund of the Goethe-Institut