Apolis - Micro-Choreographies of Speech is part of an ongoing research into language as an urban practice: not a universal code, and never fully transcribable. Every act of recording already implies a shift, a selection, a reinterpretation, a framing, so writing cannot be treated as a neutral container of speech. It is a technical and social gesture that provisionally stabilizes meaning, makes it archivable, and in doing so reveals the forces that shape what becomes “legible.”

Developed between Thessaloniki and Athens, the project approaches the city as a diffuse infrastructure of communication: an assemblage of gestures, traces, silences, and dispositifs that orient behavior long before any explicit statement is made. Looking, here, is never innocent. The gaze arranges the world, deciding figure and ground, just as communication draws routes, produces hierarchies, and sets thresholds. Rather than pursuing language as content, Apolis looks for it where it actually works: in habits, micro-rules that govern bodies, dispersed writings and signals we cross every day and no longer notice.

The work unfolds through a dérive-based methodology that treats walking as an artistic practice and a form of situated “automatic writing.” Visual and audio materials are reworked into a reading system for micro-traces and everyday choreographies: frictions, negotiations, repetitions, misunderstandings, corrections, along with the quiet normalizing pressures that make sense compatible, indexable, and increasingly optimized.

Apolis aims to make perceptible the conditions of possibility of language in urban space: what prompts speech, what produces silence, and what continues to communicate even without words.

developed during ad artist residency at bEam Arts, Thessaloniki


Residency coordinator
Kostas Synodis
Sani Deligiorgi
Anna-Maria Theodoroglou

Book
25 x 19 cm
166 pages

Font
ABC Marist, Book - Dynamo typefaces