Mnemonic Waters

Το έργο παρουσιάζεται από το Artist Residency Program του School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph.

Χρησιμοποιώντας το γεωεντοπισμό, αυτό το site-specific έργο εντοπίζει ηχητικά τον αρχαίο ποταμό Ιλισό, κάτω από την πόλη της Αθήνας. Η πρόσβαση στο έργο μπορεί να γίνει μέσω μιας εφαρμογής που ονομάζεται Echoes, από οποιονδήποτε έχει κινητή συσκευή σε μια συγκεκριμένη φυσική τοποθεσία, που βρίσκεται στους Χάρτες Google.

To hear Mnemonic Waters, download the Echoes App. It will then be heard with the App open if you walk along the indicated area marked on the map seen here (the River Ilissos). Mnemonic Waters will be featured at Platforms Project Art Fair, an international gathering of not-for-profit art organizations. The project is presented by the Artist Residency Program at The School of Environmental Sciences, the University of Guelph, curated by Julie René de Cotret.

Mnemonic Waters is a site-specific audio piece by Jenn E Norton that uses geolocation to sonically trace the ancient river of Ilissos, which lies beneath the city of Athens. Drawing upon two mythical rivers of the underworld, Hades, The River of Unmindfulness, known as Lethe, where the dead drink from its waters to forget their previous lives before rebirth, and The River Mnemosyne, which restores memory and spares the soul from transmigration.

The underground river, River Ilissos, was buried beneath post-WWII Athens in an effort to modernize the city. Running in a tunnel under Vasileos Konstantinou and Kallirois Avenues, emerging briefly behind the Temple of Olympia Zeus. The ancient banks of River Ilisos figured in Plato’s writing as the site where Socrates and the Cynics discussed their philosophies. The waters referenced in the title are a reference to another geographically displaced poetic, in which thought and the inception of ideas are like fish that swim away when disrupted, as Virginia Woolf had described in A Room of One’s Own, which is performed in the sound composition.