Citizen Sound Archive

Kypseli: Conversations in Movements is a new soundwork by Kareem al Kabbani and Tom Western. The piece is an archival collage of conversations recorded in Kypseli, Athens, in January 2020. We talk through the movements that brought us both to the neighbourhood (where we’d both been living the year before we recorded these conversations), and the movements that we’ve together been part of since then. The piece is made of the affections we can feel for a street or a […]

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Ασύρματος (Asyrmatos) is a new public sound installation by the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum. A sonic chorography, a sound-cycle, an intercity symphony, a feedback loop. It takes the form of a big radio, hooked up in the old Asyrmatos – meaning ‘Wireless’ or ‘Radio’ – neighbourhood of Athens. The city becomes both transmitter and receiver, with listeners able to tune in to sonic productions of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean – hearing the convergences, relations, and static between them. […]

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Our new radio show, broadcast on movement.radio on 29 April 2022 Relational city – an Athens that holds multiple cities inside it, based both on old entanglements of cultures and people, and on newer ideas and creativities. In this program, members of our team make a new map of Athens, finding a city built on relation and commonality. A place that contains other places. Movements that contain other movements. Citizenships that contain other citizenships. The show sounds out the everyday […]

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How can we understand citizenship beyond the state? How do people build the city, collectively and creatively? How are different citizenship struggles shared and related? SGYF was invited by Onassis Stegi to co-curate the latest video discussion in the ‘Society Uncensored‘ series, published online in January 2022. The discussion breaks the borders of citizenship, reflecting the realities of everyday urban life and showcasing street-level practices of city making. It brings together a variety of grassroots organisations engaged in practices of […]

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A radio show broadcast on movement.radio in October 2021, produced by Christina Magiaki and Vassilis Prodromou This episode is an open discussion of poetry. Based mainly on a book – The Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry – we have chosen and translated a selection of poems into Greek. Some of them are accompanied with music, others we have written ourselves. The program demonstrates some characteristics of Arabic poetry, but we aim also to raise awareness of how poetry helps and […]

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An arada performance by the SGYF Al Fawares Culture Band, live at Panepistimiou, 26/06/21. For Assembly 02 of The City Talks Back. Greetings to Damascus! Greetings to Palestine! Greetings to Athina! Παράσταση αράδας από το SGYF Al Fawares γκρουπ, λαιβ στην Πανεπιστημίου, 26/06/21. Για το Assembly 02 του πρότζεκτ Η Πόλη Ανταπαντάει. Χαιρετισμούς στη Δαμασκό! Χαιρετισμούς στην Παλαιστίνη! Χαιρετισμούς στην Αθήνα! Photos by Eleni Methymaki / Φωτογραφίες της Ελένης Μεθυμάκη

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A radio roundtable with Tom Western, Penelope Papailias, and George Mantzios A radio conversation, an anticolonial imagination. This broadcast brings together members of the ‘Memory – Monuments’ working group of Decolonize Hellas, Penelope Papailias and George Mantzios, taking Tom Western’s piece from The City Talks Back Assembly 1, ‘Παγκόσμια Ηχώ | Echos-Monde | The World is Echo’, as a jumping off point. The piece is a remapping of Athens. It finds its cartography through an imagined conversation between Athenian poets […]

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Becoming the City presents our work as active citizens in Athens. It showcases perspectives from members of our team, speaking as individuals and as one, across and through multiple languages. The piece centres on citizenship, activism, art, and the political voice: how we use diversity to create the city, find shared histories and connected cultures, use art to assert presence and belonging, and work to become Athenians. Our narratives stretch across geographies and borders. From this emerge rebellious methodologies that […]

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‘The Movement Exists in Voice and Sound’ is an audio piece produced by Kareem Al Kabbani and Tom Western, co-founders of the Active Citizens Sound Archive in Athens, Greece. In the piece they explore the sonic qualities of active citizenship through public protest and song, from Al Kabbani’s birth city, Damascus, Syria, to the pair’s adopted home city of Athens.  (Abstract written by George Kafka) Published in the collection Sonic Urbanism: The Political Voice in November 2020, edited by &beyond […]

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by Kareem al Kabbani A report by Kareem al Kabbani from Khora Social Kitchen and Café in Kypseli, Athens. With discussion of food as a way of gathering, the work of food distribution in corona times, and making spaces of inclusion.

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