»Aphonic Echotopia« is a presentation based on my ongoing two-year PhD field and artistic research on the soundscapes of the Greek borderland in Western Thrace. The work explores the politics of listening and how listening to soundscapes can be a situated, political act that confronts the border’s visible and invisible apparatus by focusing on the arrhythmic, polyrhythmic, and rhythmic soundscapes shaped by fences and patrols, oppressions and differential inclusions, ecological and political urgencies, dissonant and resonant past and present landscapes.
The presentation examines three aphonic soundscapes: A. The post-fire forest of Dadia, where the 2023 wildfire — the largest ever recorded in the EU — left behind 93,500 hectares of burned land and claimed the lives of at least 19 refugees who were trying to cross, transforming it now into a landscape penetrated by the echoes of planes and distant military drills; B. Mikro Dereio, a small minority village where drones and barking dogs disrupt the night and border patrols resonate with the area’s past as a supervised military zone; and C. Sidiro, another minority village where the most dissonant silence surrounds an unmarked mass grave of refugees.
The presentation invites the audience to think of listening as an act of witnessing and care toward the stories masked by the noise of the border.
