Sounds of our Cities is an European project of Cultural Cooperation carried out between City of Roeselare, Dear Hunter, Aalborg University and Idensitat. It aims to explore urban areas, focusing on the locality, including local audiences and reflecting on cultural identity in relationship with the community. This open call for artists to participate represents the project launch.
SoOC offers a residency to 10 artists (5 in Roeselare and 5 in Barcelona) to develop a project within the social context of each city.The project will be carried out within 20 days’ residency, to take place during April and May in Roeselare and October and November 2020 in Barcelona. The central artistic activity of the project is the development of two sound art exhibitions, which will be embedded into specific sites in the urban environments.
The call for projects focuses upon the urban context and certain architectures which form part of its heritage, although these are perceived as silenced spaces (forgotten memories or places erased from the official narratives to be reactivated by a collective process). The idea is to respond with sound art proposals in several city spaces full of history, memory, and collective imaginaries, offering the viewer a fictional landscape in which to imagine different realities, while opening up a space for debate on current issues.
The Dutch collective Dear Hunter will be responsible for selecting spaces in each city (Roeselare and Barcelona) resulting from the mapping which they will elaborate during their residency, as a first phase of the project. The site-selection process aims to identify spaces, promoting various readings of, and new relationships with, the urban context. The process is about reimagining the sites, understanding them as spaces of possibility, from which participatory dialogues may be established by offering alternatives to the new spaces that forgetfulness has generated.
The artists’ sound interventions will allow us to imagine experiences retained by the architecture itself and not visible at first sight. These interventions will create an aural melody that will augment the city's landscapes through personal experience, and will be delivered in accessible sound format through digital applications on smartphones or other devices. By way of these interventions, the forgotten realities can now emerge through the project's sound stories as a new imagined city, or as a fictitious reality which is not so different from reality itself. An opportunity to imagine the utopian or dystopian from elements of memory. In this case, it is the sound from the oddity which compels us to generate a new image of a place which is so well-known and at the same time so hidden.
Participating artists must share methodology and sensitivity in relation to issues such as collective memory, the recovery of voices, and the urban imaginary. The process will connect past and present, and allow for the re-imagining of possible futures.