Listening to the Walls

Fort Gorazda, Montenegro, 2024.

Listening to the Walls is an international site-specific project realized at Fort Gorazda in Montenegro with the participation of artists and musicians from Greece, Germany, Montenegro, and Serbia.
The project approached the former military structure as a historical site that has lost its original function. Military architecture is created as an instrument of territorial control and organized violence. Over time, however, such structures inevitably become disconnected from the systems to which they once belonged. Once the political and military context has disappeared, the fortress remains as a material trace of history.
Fort Gorazda represents a clear example of such a transformation. A space originally designed for defense now exists outside the logic of military use. Its walls, interior spaces, and acoustic structure preserve traces of the past, yet can no longer fulfill their original purpose.
The performance treated the fortress not as a backdrop for an artistic event, but as an active environment for the production of experience. Sound was used as a means of engaging with the architecture and its historical layers. Musical actions and the presence of the participants temporarily altered the condition of the space, shifting it from a historical artifact into a site of collective experience and exploration.
The project proposed an alternative way of engaging with the legacy of military history — neither through the reconstruction of the past nor through its symbolic rejection, but through the creation of a situation in which the space acquires a new form of public use. In this sense, the performance became a practice of temporarily redefining both the place itself and its function in the present.