The City as Commons

!!! CHANGE OF VENUE !!!

NEW VENUE Starting point: Kunstraum Walcheturm

Suitable for people who are good on their feed.

The event is held outdoors.

Free admission. Registration open at info@oto.museum or on Instagram oto.museum.

Prior to the performance «A Symphony of Archives» at SONIC MATTER Festival, the artist Abdellah M. Hassak and curator collective Zaira Oram will conduct a participatory workshop along the Langstrasse neighborhood. For more information write to info@oto.museum.

«The City as Commons» – Sound Walk with Abdellah M. Hassak

The aim of the sound walk is to propose a contextual action of socio-geographical reactivation of the city of Zurich, through urban maps, hearing, observing, walking, listening spots, collecting memories, making itineraries and routes of urban analysis and intimate archaeology.
It will be about building new forms of collective and citizen creation and reflection by stepping out of the Soundwalk and using the city as a social space of inquiry and encounter of geographical imaginaries. It will thus be about interrogating the potential of sound and listening practices to deconstruct political narratives that homogenize and sustain the construction of a monolithic European identity and to deploy new geopolitical narratives of a diasporic order in light of the notion of post-Westernness.
Through an intersectional perspective, an attempt is made to understand how the experience of listening - understood not as passive reception, but as a constant negotiation between reception and interpretation - can undermine the binary nature of nation-states (internal/external, inclusion/exclusion, citizen/non-citizen). The focus of the axis is on liminal and interstitial spaces excluded from traditional cartography, but whose soundscapes open up to fluid narratives.

PLANNED ACTIVITIES AND EXPECTED OUTCOMES

This soundwalk aims to capture the sound identity of the Langstrasse neighborhood and to invite the public and researchers to study, analyze and conduct collective reflection on the different sound fragments of this space.
Through an itinerary of listening and perception, we will visit the neighborhood and collect sound testimonies from the inhabitants and passersby of these streets with the support of artist Abdellah M. Hassak. In a second moment there will be an opportunity to exchange and rework the collected material. We will also work with drawings and sketches of the spaces, putting together their iconography and perceived sound identity.

Everyone is free to document the walk in an own way (image, audio or text) using phone, audio-recorder or camera.