Gilles Aubry / Stéphane Montavon
Cairo Talking Heads

Cairo Talking Heads is an audio blog by Gilles Aubry and Stephane Montavon documenting their art residency in Cairo in 2007. During the course of six weeks, they acted as "acoustic mirrors" for individuals in the city, recording oral speech fragments by various activist bloggers faced with censorship.

The artists focus mainly on documenting acoustic environments, instances of oral speech, and elements of auditory culture. Secondary emphasis is placed on the effort to learn a foreign language, in this case Arabic, through deep listening and imitation. A third thematic tracks the approach of young democratic activists who internationalize their voice and struggle via blogs in English. These three interwoven threads reflect pervasive remnants of Orientalism and present ways of gaining exposure, for instance by constantly listening and then transmitting. 

Thoughts and texts describing the experience of different meetings and situations, transcriptions of interviews, and sound works are the elements that punctuate the blog www.cairotalkingheads.blogspot.com. By surfing it, listeners will immediately submit to in the acoustic tensions of Cairo and gradually participate in the game of mixing their own sound works to recreate its landscape. 

(Text: Gilles Aubry and Stéphane Montavon)