In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, through the character of Marco Polo, introduces us to fifty-five poetic descriptions of city life. Despite the depiction of space, architecture, and everyday practices as diverse and incomparable, this highly imaginative novel gives readers a peculiar sensation that all stories might actually pertain to a single city – Venice, Marco Polo’s hometown.

Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Inaudible Cities explores the suburbs, resulting in a series of spontaneously generated soundscapes that highlight the often-ignored sonorities of our urban environments. Inaudible Cities #3 invites participants to a hybrid walk where normally inaudible flows and movements of earth, air, fire, and water within Ljubljana’s city infrastructure serve as gateways to temporally and geographically distant sonic environments and memories.

The project is the third iteration in a series of soundwalking initiatives that explore the soundscapes of urban peripheries. What stories about the city emerge when our focus shifts from the central to the peripheral, from the visual to the sonic, and from the extraordinary to the infra-ordinary?

Photo: Matej Tomažin, Cona.

Participants will be equipped with receivers, enabling them to listen to this evolving composition and influence it by controlling recording and transmitting equipment.

Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer and educator. His work explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, experimental archives, installations and diverse forms of writing. He holds a PhD from Malmö University. He was a researcher at Linköping University at Simon Fraser University, and 2022/2023 Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard. In 2019, he co-founded the Walking Festival of Sound.