The National Garden of Athens is transformed into an audio book of stories by people all over the world, during the pandemic, telling about their favorite public gardens and reading from their favorite books at home during lockdown. You can listen to the recordings while walking inside the National Garden of Athens through a webapp on your mobile phone or at home on a interactive map on your desktop.

All readings begin with up to one minute of silence recorded inside the reading spaces during lockdown with only the sounds of homes and personal libraries, as a memory of the lockdown isolation.

More contents will be added in the months to come, so you can make the walk more than once or visit the map again, every time it will be different.

Libraries as Gardens is a sound project, geolocating on a global scale the before, during, and after of the coronavirus lockdown, through recordings of silences and people’s stories told and read in their personal libraries and through their memories of public gardens. The recordings are simultaneously relayed in an augmented audio project, creating sound walks for the future, when the gardens open again, and available for all their walkers, in many cities of the world.

The first walk and pilot version of the map in progress is now presented in Athens.

You can still participate from all over the world with your readings and recordings, even if you are not in lockdown anymore, and we will place them on our map (no recording device needed, you can make and send your recording directly via this link):

https://supercluster.eu/projects/librariesasgarden/

A production by Supercluster with CGeomap in collaboration with the International Analogio Festival. Project coördinated by Geert Vermeire.