Cityphonic Walks: Soundwalks of the poetic body in urban and suburban spaces//PPS project by Irini Kalogeropoulou

The phone (voice) of a city is constituted of a set of sounds, a soundscape that can be understood as “an environment of sound (or sonic environment) with emphasis on the way it is perceived and understood by the individual, or by a society”( Schafer, 1969). Consequently, this environment becomes a resource that gives us a lot of information about the social, cultural, economic, political and environmental lives of our cities’ inhabitants. But how familiar are people with listening and how do we experience public space in an era where our ears have been blinded? The project proposes soundwalking as an artistic practice that follows and explores the itinerary of walking, listening and soundmaking in public space. Soundwalks form a bridge between the everyday experience of walking, and mindful, creative listening, framing what could be an everyday activity and giving this experience the potential for listening and thinking about sound in the environment.(McArtney, 2010). In this case the body that walks, listens, creates can be considered as a poetic body but it would be more appropriate to describe it as an imagining body, a body that realizes the potential for movement and gesture to be generative (Nixon, 2015) and that responds to the creative potential of imaginative engagement with the world around us. The process starts from written instructions based on text, graphic notation and poetry, forming a relationship between language (as score), and event. The score as a device that “trans-acts” between (visual) language, enactment, the body, and space (Folkerts, 2016) creates an open field for communal sonic practices making appreciable the force and the possibility of a shared “cosmos” (Voegelin, 2018).Different modes of listening such as embodied(Lefebvre,2004), musical, evocative, political, historical (McCartney,2010) while walking in the city constitute a way to enter urban processes and transformations and to intervene later to them creating new narratives. Intervention take place through soundmaking and become an important part of a soundwalk. Its purpose is to explore sounds that are related to the environment, and, on the other hand, to become aware of one's own sounds (voice, footsteps, etc.) in the environmental context.’(Shafer, 1977)