I’ve Heard on Skipper Street: Exploring Lived and Imagined City Identities Through Voicescapes of Its Passers-by
This project explores how personal stories and everyday voices—shared through oral history and sound—can reveal the identity of Schipperskwartier, a layered neighborhood in Antwerp shaped by migration, maritime memory, and social boundaries. Once home to a vibrant Greek community of sailors, the area was filled with music, dance, and cultural exchange. Today, little of that presence remains. Through workshops and interviews with the local community, the project collects sonic fragments, urban myths, and lived experiences to reimagine and activate echoes of the past—tracing how memory shapes the present and future. These voices will be archived in a digital map of oral histories, co-created with the curatorial initiative IN ΣKIPPERΣTREET. The collected material will inspire a multimedia installation combining field recordings, video, and live performance by Sibil-la Ensemble, a medieval-inspired contemporary music group. Outcomes will be shared through two public workshops at the RCA with staff and students from both the Conservatoire and the Academy. A keynote and academic paper will be presented at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies, hosted by Eliwise Academy. The project is embedded in the Conservatoire’s CREATIE research group, exploring cultural heritage as a transdisciplinary artistic method, and developed in close collaboration with ArchiVolt, aiming to activate the archive through artistic research.
Results
The project will produce four interconnected outcomes. First, an online archive of collected oral histories, commissioned by IN ΣKIPPERΣTREET. The map will result from story-gathering activities led by community groups curated by IN ΣKIPPERΣTREET and the artist, who will jointly facilitate workshops in Schipperskwartier. It will be hosted on IN ΣKIPPERΣTREET’s website and developed with support from Archivolt and CREATIE. The platform will serve as a research tool and a catalyst for new collaborations between artists and scholars.
Second, two public workshops at the RCA, presented as part of the NextDoors and the ARTICULATE series, will share in-progress findings and explore artistic and compositional methodologies. These sessions will foster dialogue between staff, students, and partners, and offer a feedback forum between Archivolt and CREATIE. Third, a multimedia installation and composition performed by Sibil-la Ensemble—Hague-based group of Greek diaspora musicians—will reimagine the collected stories through sound and performance. The installation will be curated by Irini Gudas, a New York–based curator whose work bridges archival research and contemporary art. Fourth, the project will culminate in a keynote and peer-reviewed paper at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies, hosted by Eliwise Academy as well a paper published at the FORUM+.
