Walking Athens

On May 14th, 2024, Circadian writer Noam Assayag welcomed greek artist Mary Marinopoulou who just returned from a residency in Klaipėda, Lithuania, for a whole day of participatory urban (and self-) exploration in Athens. It was an occasion to develop a dialog between her walking methodology, the Absorb Ensemble, and Noam Assayag’s hands-on book Activating Cities, leading the participants to perceive and build upon details from their urban surrounding, within an ecology of attention.

The resulting workshop, Walking Athens, also included DIY notebook-binding and will serve as a template for a patient exploration of our neighbourhood, in concentric cercles, with friends, strangers and neighbours. Thanks to the magic of cyanotype and to the sunlight streaming in KOKTO’s courtyard, collected items and fragments found in the street became blue shadows on the cover of the notebooks the participants took home to continue journaling.

Whether picking a card from a new deck or picking one up from the street, walkers joined an uninterrupted surrealist game between cities, using happenstance to get a prompt in the style of « pay attention to X for the next hour ». The rules of the games, taken from different chapters of Activating Cities, were exhibited in KOKTO’s library area, as part of the installation « Forty Flowers of Attention ». And so, if you find a card on the sidewalk, don’t hesitate to ask Noam for a personalized (and typewritten) attention-prompt to keep this game of “noticing” going.