Improvisation_1

The soundscape accompanied the installation A Matter Of Survival- Act I, exhibited in House For An Art Lover in Glasgow 2019. 

This ongoing exploration focuses on the nature of events that occur within the “state of exception,” the way Giorgio Agamben interpreted it as a permanent state of emergency in which laws are suspended, personal freedom curtailed, by the state’s desire to maintain control and authority. The sound piece is comprised of sounds of Athenian streets that were recorded by citizens after I requested it through social media.  It was installed as a sound sculpture through the use of a horn speaker and an amplifier.

Ulysses' Song

In this work, I decided to take further my research on placemaking and active citizenship and make an intimate nuanced portrait of Glasgow city. Inspired by Chantal Akerman’s “News from Home” a brilliant meditation on urban alienation, personal and familial disconnection I asked seven people from who are not from UK, including myself, to describe their very first day in Glasgow. I recorded their descriptions and decided to create a soundscape to manifest how cultural differences, can shape, differentiate and inhabit our surroundings and a place’s identity.

First Day In Glasgow

Audio 02:05 minutes, 2020

This piece is a recording of myself singing acapella the song “World Love” by The Magnetic Fields, while I was emptying my studio space before the lockdown. This tender and popular song with its rather subversive lyrics fills a now empty room with the reverberation of my own voice. Accompanied by field recordings from my daily walking and the sound of the Aegean sea, a peaceful yet dangerous sound since it signifies a border crossing. The sound of the seashore marks the end of an adventure and the beginning of another one.

This innocent song belongs to an ambiguous territory between a hope for political action, a farewell to the past and a way to adapt to or define the new “normal”.

A Protest Song

On The Duty of Civil Disobedience, is a work in progress audio piece that is made using text-to-speech software. In its 3.15-minute duration the software reads the opening section of American poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience" (1849).

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿The term ‘civil disobedience’ was coined by Thoreau in order to describe his refusal to pay the state poll tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. Originally conceived and intended as an installation, this piece aims to raise questions around this term, the meaning it could evoke and what it could refer to in the present day.

On The Duty of Civil Disobedience

Born in Athens, Greece (1988), Marita Pappa is an interdisciplinary artist exploring forms of active citizenship and the current nature of democracy.
https://www.maritapappa.com/