Pope.L: "Whispering Campaign at Radio Athènes", April 25, 2017

Whispering Campaign is a sound performance art work that uses whispers to irritate, disturb, provoke and elevate in order to make the visible, invisible and the invisible, visible. The project is a kind of haunting of Europe or more accurately a re-statement in hisses, slobbers and lisps of the spirits and anxieties currently besieging the community of Europe.

Whispering Campaign is composed of two main components: installations of electronic speakers and live performances. The installations are located in restaurants, cafes, museums, parks, parking lots, a bar, a mall, a bike, a car and a radio station. The live performances can occur almost anywhere. The installations and performances have been scripted into a score: a two-sided document that can be found at installation sites as well as the press and information office.

Over the 200 days of documenta, the Whispering Campaign, in both Athens and Kassel, will broadcast more than nine thousand hours of material. The texts for the work were generated in several ways: 1. Original material written by the artist 2. Borrowed or found texts 3. Borrowed or found texts collaged together to make new texts 4. Impromptu descriptions generated on site by wandering performers responding to the city as they walked.

Traditionally Whispering Campaigns have been used to destroy a reputation or win a political election. The Whispering Campaign I have created is not so specific. However, this Campaign is also interested in the dark side of our nature—for example, the side of our nature that pisses in the middle of the plaza in the brightest of light of day.

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Pope.L is an artist and an educator based in Chicago, his work is featured in Documenta 14.