“Languages of the Unheard: at the opening concert of the Tehran International Electronic Music Festival, on February 19, 2022. The work will stay online until March 5th on the festival’s webpage (tiemf.com)
Languages of the Unheard, is an experiment of conversing in the language of protest, we created together with Danae Theodoridou for Freiraum Festival 2020. Languages of the Unheard was commissioned by the project “Common Lab”, a Goethe-Institut Excellency Initiative by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki & ArtBOX, in collaboration with TIF- HELEXPO and Freiraum Festival 2020. Curated by Christos Savvidis.
Forever grateful to the lovely women, Maria Apostolakea, Marijana Cvetkovic, Ivana Filip, Elena Koukoli, Janeda Milo, Eleni Mylona, Stefanie Schweiger, Έλενα Σίγμα & Tina Yotopoulou, who inhabited our idea with such generosity and devotion!
Program notes
‘WHAT WE MUST SEE is that a riot is the language of the unheard.’, Martin Luther King
Following a performance score, i.e. a list of instructions similar to those of a board game, Languages of the Unheard construct an online visual and auditory manifesto based on the language of signs and slogans coming from important protests in different European countries from the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) or ‘Common Market’ in 1957 to 2020.
Playing with the performativity of zoom’s feature to ‘rename’ ourselves, we will change constantly our names using the language of those signs, producing a written dialogue in the language of protest. During this dialogue, parts of our words will be audio processed and fed back into the dialogue in different ways, creating a soundscape of languages of the unheard.
This ‘silent’ conversation aims to reveal the materiality of the language of protest in order to create an embodied experience of its social force. What stays from our common fights in public space when we don’t have the proximity of our bodies? How can we turn immaterial language into a material ‘action’ in the way Arendt defined the term as the human ability to initiate something in public space that addresses the many without being able to control its outcome in advance?
dimitri papageorgiou 