“Domofon” (“The door phone”) is a sound installation based on human voice, the oldest instrument in the world. It consists of voices of women from different places on Earth, who are now either permanently or temporarily living in Wrocław or Lower Silesia.

Domofon is a project based on personal meetings and conversations, during which the Participants were talking about their reasons for coming to Poland, the first impressions of the town and their current living situation. One of the stories was always told in their native language; these are the sound sources in the installation.

All voices can be played individually. They can resonate, compete, amplify or weaken one another. It is up to the listener which buttons they want to press.

On one hand, this installation presents individual experience; on the other hand it is just pure sound. Here, understanding means that we accept giving voice to others, even if we can’t understand everything. These voices of people living in our city become the listener’s focus of attention for a brief moment. Their reception will depend on many factors responsible for human perceptual abilities, such as habitual perception, knowledge of foreign languages, fear of the Other or an attempt of understanding the stories. Similar to Hardt and Negri, the work is intended to foster a meeting beyond the borders of the Empire. It is intended to become a flow, mixing and creating a new quality.

The stories are the effect of establishing personal relations and longer conversations in private. Transferred to the public area, the stories establish the multiplicity of narratives, ‘micro-histories’ that create an alternative to the conventional history. This is the part of the town’s history, a fragment of the never-ending narrative.

Unconventional histories, or ‘oral stories’, are part of the decolonisation and identity creation. They create a more inclusive space, taking into account all actors, both inanimate and unanimate. In this space languages may become sounds that constitute the part of the urban phonospere.