Stimmen "Traces and Séances"

The voice is an expression of life: it reveals something about the body and one’s state of mind, bearing personal and historical traces. At the same time, it can deceive, imitate or fall silent. It rises up, makes itself heard and becomes an expression of individuality and resistance.

But what happens when voices outlast their creators, who have long since fallen silent? When they return from archives, are reassembled, or, as artificial voices, challenge our conception of what it means to be human? The evening is dedicated to the voice as a literary expression, an acoustic phenomenon and a bearer of memory.

A vocal performance opens the programme: the writer Kerstin Hensel, together with Ujesh Buchele and Sean Douglas, creates a satirical opening that plays with language.

During the subsequent tour of three venues, the voice can be experienced in ever-changing ways: as spoken language, as a historical recording, as sound and as a physical-mechanical presence.

In the ‘Séance Méchanique’, Andrei Cucu, Steffi Weismann and JD Zazie jointly conjure up voices from the past. Record players, mechanical amplification and whispering funnels open up a space where the boundary between the analogue and the digital, between presence and absence, becomes blurred.

Following this, historical sound recordings enter into dialogue with the present: Friedrich Dieckmann speaks about Ernst Bloch. Ulrich Peltzer focuses on the voices of Gottfried Benn and Johannes Becher. Kathrin Röggla establishes new connections between the literary voices of Silvia Bovenschen, Heiner Müller, Ilse Aichinger and Friederike Mayröcker, and explores how literature resonates across eras, bodies and linguistic spaces.

The evening concludes with Andy Ammer and the duo driftmachine presenting a live audio-performative interpretation: recordings of a reading by Heiner Müller on Edgar Allan Poe are sampled, given a rhythmic structure and musically re-composed.

In the process, the voice breaks free from its original context and takes on a new sonic form. Moving between literature, the archive and experimental sound, the evening explores the vitality of voices and what remains audible when people have fallen silent.