Antropia originated as an attempt to produce an observational documentary within the grounds of Expo 2015 in Milan, with the initial intent of documenting the site’s temporary architecture and analysing the flow and behavior of the visiting crowds. During the filming process, our focus shifted as a result of an unintended incident: due to a miscommunication, co-director Guglielmo Trupia appeared within the frame while recording direct sound.

This unexpected event introduced a new layer to the project, allowing for the emergence of a fictional presence within the highly controlled spatial narrative of the Expo. A mysterious figure, equipped with a directional microphone, begins to “listen” to the visitors. Is this an attempt to establish contact?

This dynamic of disorientation and failed communication evokes the atmosphere of Epepe, a novel by Ferenc Karinthy, in which a linguist finds himself lost in an unknown city, unable to decipher its language, customs, or spatial codes. Much like the protagonist of Antropia, Karinthy’s character is immersed in an environment that appears rationally constructed yet is existentially opaque. Listening, however futile or fragmented, becomes a mode of survival, a way to resist total estrangement and assert one’s presence within an indifferent or unintelligible system. In both cases, listening does not promise understanding, but insists on relation.

In the editing phase, we deliberately chose to abandon the original location sound. Instead, we returned to the site to capture what we termed the “acoustic traces of architecture,” using contact microphones, electromagnetic detectors, and hydrophones. This shift allowed us to rearticulate the Expo site and its ephemeral urban logic through a speculative-critical lens, drawing on both documentary practice and science-fiction aesthetics to question the ideological foundations of large-scale event urbanism.