The Istanbul Soundscape Project focuses on a different topography of auditory life at its third event. A space that is full of all the submerged and hidden materiality of the urban topography: metro lines, energy distribution networks, data networks, pipe networks. Where sound carries as physical matter, a mass of energy billowing out along passageways and tunnels, caverns and tombs; The Underground.
From the dark atmosphere to the often noxious smells, the underground is a space of repression; it’s a zone full of secrets. The underground acts as a reverberant space; cavernous and dim, it echoes with sounds and voices that unfold in uncertain yet urgent messages. Underground is a a place of resistance, and resistance to political reality. Its acoustics carry together the essential potentiality of sound to echo, expand, and disorient, while being interwoven with forces of struggle, hope, and resistance. The underground is also the place chosen by human beings for science fiction and utopian/dystopian fantasies. Passages, caves, tunnels, subways, underground railways, secret clubs, underground creatures and monsters. In those fantasies the situation of living underground aided an anti-authoritarian and equitable character, as if the circumstances above ground could be reversed.
We want the reality sought through voice and music to be a supported and generative relationship by an acoustical space full of echoes, textures and shadows. So as the Istanbul Soundscape Project we are inviting the sonic artists of the city to make audiovisual productions by recording at the most unknown places in Istanbul, such as underground railways, tunnels, caves, secret passages.
The underground is the place where resistance has begun!