Lisboa is a fascinating, deeply immersive sound art by Serbian violinist, sound artist, curator, and researcher Manja Ristić, dedicated to the capital of Portugal. Ristić recorded, edited, and composed seven soundscapes created during her free, intuitive roaming in Lisbon in April 2024, with no preconceived agenda. She visited the city’s botanical garden, the banks of the Rio Tejo, both in the urban core and near its Atlantic estuary, an independent gallery, and several museums. She also attended a political performance and a Free Palestine demonstration.
Ristić follows Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice. With her sound art, she questions what in sound can shift our sense of depth within a given space, or what elusive somatic effects these spaces provoke: spontaneous sensorial recall, subtle shifts in bodily orientation, or sensations of elevation or expanded awareness. Ristić has developed her own concept of Mnemopolitics — the ways memory is shaped, contested, and distributed across a society, not only through monuments or narratives, but through sensory experience, personal histories, and various cultural and subcultural appropriations.
Lisboa’s soundscapes faithfully capture the city’s layered history and its unique, radiant interplay of openness and density, acting as a living archive. This is a city shaped by maritime expansion, seismic catastrophe, colonial complexity, dictatorship, revolution, the long, unfinished labour of collective remembering, and the quiet resilience of neighbourhoods resisting erasure under the pressures of tourism and gentrification. This work offers rare insights into Lisbon’s magic, a city that is fully aware of its past and listens to its complex identity.
Ristić traces and weaves intimate micro-ecologies—ocean, river, forest, birds conversing with machines, transport systems, bridges, barges, and electrical grids, alongside human voices, noise pollution, fragile habitats, and cultural spaces. She finds mysterious, subtle sonic morphologies and surprising synchronisations unfolding beneath the surface. The album’s closing, which includes an excerpt from the public performance Air Protest by artist António Caramelo (an imaginary protest that is formalized as a response to the pro-life demonstration), and sounds from the demonstration, channels this sound art into an urgent, inspiring political lesson, where bodies, histories, and environments converge in collective action, insisting on freedom and justice for the oppressed.
«In Lisbon, memory is not a monument but an acoustic phenomenon — dispersed, refracted, and continually renegotiated», Ristić concludes. «The city listens to itself through its own reverberations, and in doing so, it insists that history remains audible, contested, and alive… releasing forgotten memories from its holofractal belly, ensuring that every grain of painfully earned freedom remains accounted for. It is a soundscape that must be preserved at all costs».
Eyal Hareuveni
