Undercartographies

by Tom Western

  • A sonic geopoetics on four wavelengths

    A sonic geopoetics on four wavelengths

    There’s a neighbourhood in Athens called radio. Ασύρματος – literally meaning “wireless” or “radio” – is a place named after an old naval radio school that used to sit on the slopes of one of the hills that float upwards into the Athens skyline.

  • The spill, the fold, the spiral

    The spill, the fold, the spiral

    In Athens borders follow people around. The colonial map weighs heavy, pressing down on people forced to move or unable to move or both. But the city gathers spatial imaginations, made of errantry and history and multiplicity, and the city becomes mobile. Here we write shapes and strategies that turn the city into a sea…

  • Ασυρματος (Mediterradio)

    Ασυρματος (Mediterradio)

    ‘Asyrmatos’ (Mediterradio) is a radio special. Taking its name from the old neighbourhood of Athens – Ασύρματος, literally meaning ‘wireless’ or ‘radio’ – the program sounds out layers of history and Mediterranean relations. Asyrmatos is one of the 1922 settlements of Athens, a place made out of displacement. The neighbourhood called radio is our jumping…

  • Παγκοσμια ηχω | Echos-Monde | The World is Echo

    Παγκοσμια ηχω | Echos-Monde | The World is Echo

    This piece is a remapping of Omonoia – the circular square in the middle of Athens. It finds its cartography through an imagined conversation between two poets – Édouard Glissant and Nicolas Calas – who both think in circles and circulations, and make a musical language that sounds out the rhythms and relations of struggle.…

  • Notes on an Anticolonial Athens

    Notes on an Anticolonial Athens

    There’s a history that flickers and never fully comes into focus. An anticolonial Athens.[1] Not in the sense of the new capital after Greek independence in the 1820s – that’s something else. But an attempt to place the city into global relations of decolonial struggle in the decades following World War II and after. In 1957,…