Sound Acts in Victoria Square

The project is about a participatory sound installation and action at Victoria Square in Athens, dealing with the social and gendered space, and specifically with the way that the frequenters of the square gather around and socialize in certain places. The visitors, mostly male natives and immigrants and refugees, seek to create the conditions of a temporary ‘home’ and a public 'living room' as a place to gather and socialize. The project aimed to create conditions to talk about the absence of women in the square, as a general observation about public spaces in Greece. Intensifying thus the social contradictions between public spheres, in a way that can lead to new understandings and appropriations of the space.

Based on such observations, I used the medium of sound installation and action [sound acts] as a practice of intervening in a public space, by inserting recorded sounds of female voices into existing conversations at the square. The designed sound acts were developed in two phases; in the first phase, I realized and recorded actions of conversations, within two months, with various women visitors in the square, as well as archived and ordered the collected material. The second phase is about the planning and realization of the in-situ broadcasting of the collected sound material and conversations with the public.

The project was selected for the Visual Arts greek participation at the Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale, Tirana and Durres, 2017 and was published in the online Filipino magazine Transit in 2015, the Atlantis Magazine for Urbanism & Landscape Architecture - TUDelft in March 2017 and the journal Nutida Musik in December 2016.