Two years on from his arresting participation in X Apartments-Athens, the acclaimed Akira Takayama (b. 1969), the Japanese director who has dedicated himself to the search for a new social function for theatre, returns with a large-scale project that will be enacted on the streets of Athens and Piraeus. The starting point: Omonoia. The destination: Piraeus. The goal: to re-discover Athens’ port city and its long history as a departure point for emigrants and a point of arrival for refugees in a hands-on, experiential way by means of an audio-walk laden with historical memories and new experiences, myths and fictions.

Equipped with smartphones, specially designed apps and maps, viewer become geographers and undertake a new topographic, historical, social, political and cultural mapping of Piraeus as they walk the route linking seven landmarks. The desire to reclaim everyday public space and the urban landscape as "other", familiar and unfamiliar, mythic and real, critical and liminal—a heterotopia, in other words, of the sort described by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault—guides the project. Seven poets, authors and thinkers from around the World join forces to write original texts about Piraeus as an anthropogeographical palimpsest.

The Heterotopia project began life as a radio-tour of Tokyo neighbourhoods in 2013. It has subsequently developed into a specially-designed smartphone app which will cover some 100 landmarks around the Japanese capital by the 2020 Olympic Games. It has already travelled to a number of Asian cities in various guises and variations, and has even quit the pavement for motorcycles as part of a spectacle-visit to one of the resorts/landmarks of Japan’s colonial past. Piraeus/Heterotopia, the first European version of the project, was commissioned by the OCC.

The audience will walk and move outdoors.