Public lecture. Part of the thematic seminar "Speechless: The Proximity of Gesture, Philosophy and Cinema"
"In my talk I will consider the city as a shifting assemblage of temporal traces, but from the perspective of the listener. What could it mean to listen to a city? I began to listen to Paris, using the documentary photographer Eugene Atget as my guide to the present. Several years ago I set out with my light apparatus to systematically make sound recordings at the site of each of his images. What I heard was a city with no centre, a city where figure and ground are often indiscernible or interchangeable, a city whose undeniable density opened at points to admit weather, death, animals, children and strangers, those apparently non-productive agents or perceived foci of civic danger. This talk will present some of these gathered sound documents in the context of a careening theory and philosophy of the edges of civic phenomena. It represents a present." A lecture in the framework of the thematic seminar "Speechless: The Proximity of Gesture, Philosophy and Cinema".