In Invisible Cities, through the character of Marco Polo, Italo Calvino introduces us to fifty-five poetic descriptions of life in a city.[1] Despite the depiction of space, architecture, and everyday life practices as greatly diverse and incomparable to each other, within the course of this highly imaginative novel the reader gets a strange feeling that all stories might in fact pertain to a single city, Venice, Marco Polo’s hometown. Inspired by the story, in Inaudible Cities I explore the suburbs of Stockholm, where I live, to create a series of short stories describing diverse facets of city life from the perspective of what we have conveniently accepted to call “urban peripheries”. Through a series of soundwalking excursions to those peripheries, I ask what stories about the city can be revealed if the focus on the “sonic infra-ordinary” replaces our addiction to the “extra-ordinary”?

Book Abstract:

An anthology that traces the long legacy of interdisciplinary experimentations at the intersection of walking, listening, and soundmaking.Since the 1960s, the act of walking has provided a way for artists and musicians to escape the formality of the concert hall or institutional venue, engaging with shifting public spaces, natural environments, and the social and political sphere. Walking redefines notions of composer, performer, public, and music itself, while opening new modes of perception and action. Going Out addresses these developments by exploring the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts—from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today's manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives, and reflections. Through the variety of these contributions, the book makes an argument that at the intersection of walking, listening, and soundmaking there is both a long legacy of interdisciplinary experimentations and a broad field that resounds with urgent issues in critical spatial thinking and practice.