In his articulation of the “panopticon” as the ultimate conceptual instrument of modern state-power, Michel Foucault situates vision and surveillance as the main tools which facilitate state control and oppression over its space and subjects. According to Foucault, the “gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates”. By proposing everyday sound as text extracted from its paths in cityscapes and urban fabric, we borrow tools from humanities, critical theory, and comparative literature into working of art-based research that seeks to analyze the layers, the overlaps, the compositions, and the narrations of such texts, including memory/oblivion politics, focalization, intertextuality, articulation of silenced/muted out voices, gender politics, socio-political and economic sonic classifications/stratifications, as well as socio-spatial configurations of sounds. This workshop includes presentations, site visits, case studies, round table discussions, and literature readings. Such activities will allow us all (the participants and the facilitator), on the one hand, to identify our cities’s sound fabric as a fabric of compound struggling powers seeking dominance not only over our bodies as physical spatial objects but also trying, as any possible discourse to apply such power(s) narrations. This workshop is designed especially for researchers, artists, architects, urbanists, performers, and anyone working on The City as phenomena.

Language: Arabic.

*2 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York, Vintage Books, 1994, p39.