Ant Hampton: Detouristiki / In View of What We Stand to Lose

In May 2022, I found myself on the island of Samos, right next to Turkey. As recounted in my book-with-audio Borderline Visible, a series of events led me to spend a day at the beach with a man called Anelka, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He had lost everything, including his sister, at the hands of Frontex and the Greek coastguard over the course of three attempts to reach those shores.

Though incomparable to the violent trauma of what Anelka had been through, my own journey thus far – a long research trip for an art project – had not been easy. Things had spun off course, and I no longer knew what I was doing on the island as an artist. Nor did I fulfil any other role: I was not a businessman, an aid worker, a lawyer, or a journalist.

Hanging out together with Anelka that day, we found ourselves playing the role of tourists. For our own very different reasons, we both knew this was not what we were on the island for. My own mild sense of imposter syndrome offered a kind of access to the much stronger one being experienced by Anelka. It afforded us a strange distance from everything we ended up doing – strolling, bathing, observing, taking space, eating at a restaurant. Banality was shot through with a sense of the extraordinary; nothing was taken for granted.

Since that day, I have been preoccupied by how mainstream tourism, obviously enough, does not do business with sadness, fear, lament, rage or the complexities, problematics, and contradictions of its own operations. “Detouristiki” is a curious figure who seems to enjoy shape-shifting. During my research in Athens, she was a tour guide who had given up on pretending to ignore certain geopolitical realities and subjectivities, and preferred to whisper, sing, or scream rather than speak in monotone. By the end of those three months, she was asking for silence and contemplation.

For a participatory action called “In View of What We Stand to Lose”, we head to where tourists gather to watch the sun go down over Athens.

We ask them for two minutes of silence and stillness, no phones.

*

There are nearly thirty of us and we meet at the foot of Mount Lycabettus, on the relatively quiet Dexameni Square. Standing in a circle, we are briefed through a series of typed, cut-out individual sentences; bits of paper passed, in silence, from person to person. By the time the last sentence has made its round, we all know what is going to happen and what we are about to do.

It takes nearly thirty minutes to climb to the viewpoint. We go up in silence, spaced apart, listening for and noting down fragments of conversation from passing tourists, fragments that we will get back to later.

In our pockets or bags, we carry nearly thirty cards that we have been given for later use, bearing this message:

Dear visitor – when the bell rings, we will observe two minutes of silence. Please support this moment of contemplation by kindly remaining silent and still, phones away. Thank you so much.

The only possible reason for the silence is given in eight words:

in view

of what

we stand

to lose

At the top, we find a confined space with the proportions and feeling of a boat’s deck: vertiginous drop-offs on either side converge into a hull-like point, with a flagpole and mast-like bell tower at the center, and a small church at the back instead of a driver’s cabin. People chatter, take selfies, point to details of the city below where they have already been, fret over where the kids have gone.

We move in this crowd while listening on headphones to a binaural recording of tourists in the same spot – a flowing, multilingual babble that seems to be all around us. And it is, but the tourists we hear were recorded some days before – anonymous, gone now, possibly not even in Athens anymore, starting to scatter themselves back across the planet. Still assembled in our headphones, the sound of their voices layers precisely over the people around us, whose presence is confirmed by our other senses.

“Where do we get the boat from” / “Is the sun going down over here – oh, there” / “Do you want some more ouzo – yeah”

After a couple of minutes, the recording outs itself as being highly edited. It is seamless, but we begin to notice occasional repetitions or extensions of snippets already heard. There is a slow-build dramaturgy to the composition, with things getting louder and more rowdy with time.

At the recording’s peak, a bell rings. Everyone falls silent. For the first time, the ambient sounds of the city beyond and below this confined area become audible. Though the tourists around us continue their chatter and activity, through our noise-cancelling headphones we hear the results of a past silence. The recording continues for two minutes – some shuffling, a cough, the occasional shush. Finally, a voice speaks to us, inviting us to think through how best to turn this recording into actuality: time now to distribute the cards and request a new two-minute silence from the tourists actually present this evening.

Spreading out evenly among the crowd, we approach people kindly: “Excuse me – soon, there will be silence”. Their bewildered response opens a space in which to place the message as we pass them a card.

Once everyone seems to have read it, one of us rings a bell. Silence falls. Again, like an insect shedding its skin, the “local” sound (imported from all over the world) slips away, revealing the real locality: the city beyond. Our ears stretch out in every direction, even upwards where swifts scream their tumbling loops. Phone screens are gone and people stand still, vertical figures facing the horizon, where the sun creates the illusion of going down as our planet continues to turn.

After three minutes (in the spirit of performance, time is stretched), the bell rings again. Chatter resumes after a tentative applause, and we leave, descending the hill, spaced apart again and in silence until we gather in the same circle where two cards are passed around in different directions.

The work ends by sharing our own “recordings” – the fragments overheard on the way up, and noted down– using for the first time our own voices, as we try to find the right time to speak.

For updates see www.anthampton.com

Project by Ant Hampton

with Elpida Orfanidou and Ledi Kovatsi.

Created following research carried out in Palermo (supported by Teatro Bastardo) and Athens (supported by Onassis AiR).

Thanks to Sanem Su Avci, Noam Assayag, Nicola Nitido, Natasha Rijkhoff, Mike Kitcher, Markos Moschos.