Sailing for over two months across the coasts of the Middle East, Italy, Northern Africa and Southern Europe, equipped with scanners, aerial antennae and recorders, Soundwalk Collective intercepted – with such technologically augmented hearing – accidental overlaps of noises, music and voices, private conversations and service communications, bouncing back and forth between boats, ships and the coast. A soundscape of the Mediterranean basin, composed by retracing Ulysses’ journey from Troy to Ithaca. A vastness of sound fragments, songs harmonies: a choir, an audible entropy. They listened to these recordings again in their studio, in order to grasp the sense of each sound, of each trace, of each diaphony: hints of stories, slices of worlds, letting themselves be led to what turned out to be an état des lieux of the Mediterranean basin. The result is a continuously rearranged musical map, a polyphonic installation, the reflection of a sonic world.
This phonography now echoes on the first floor of Beit Beirut, previously known as Yellow House, a neo-Ottoman-style building erected in 1924 by architect Youssef Afandi Aftimos. The building became the main military outpost and home of snipers in the years of the civil war that afflicted Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. Abandoned and vandalized for years, it witnessed a recent rebirth as a museum and cultural center. Except its first floor, which preserves, intact and clearly visible, traces of the daily life of snipers who over the years made it a funeral home.
The building, characterized by an empty central axis that extends towards the sky, is now a treasure trove of the city’s memory, of which it preserves the tragedies as well as the splendors, the stories of life and war, of rebirth. With Ulysses Syndrome, its past resounds and is amplified in the whispers and the songs that have always slipped, impalpable, on the surface of the Mediterranean, accompanying the uninterrupted flow of our history, dramatic yet sublime.