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Reading is a means for listening
Dear Readers
The readers “booth” was once an office for an overseer but now: houses letters, books, sample ends of cloth, bell ropes and a microphone.
The booth’s open windows look out to a forest of images, portraits of féve’s printed in gigantic proportion. For me, the miniature hand-painted porcelain figures hold an emotional quality: they are gestural, are human like - but are not human. I think of the figures, once baked into “kings cakes” as figures of luck or good fortune. They are the audience listening to your readings.
Your words fill them from a past, they are also a future, a future made by cake’s chance, by good wishes, by hardwork, by words. By ……. you. Thank you for joining We Will Sing.
The cadence of your reading is one of three aural textures that weave, overlap and shape the feeling in the space. The pattern and pace of your voice reading out loud meets the singular whistle and song coming from the spinning room and the choral songs coming from the recordsin the canal side room. Each has a different rhythm. Keep in mind you are reading to the images and to yourself and are not performing what you are reading.
The patterns of your voice become one of the atmosphere’s many textures. The signature of your voice isjoining and animating what is already there, is a cadence that holds thespace without dominating it.
The Process
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In front of you is a ledge with a sample book of selected letters to the future. To your upper right are newspapers from the project. To your left, a small collection of books. Please select one or more items to read out loud.
I have alternated between the letters and the books. Some pages are marked with a book marks, but please make your own selections.
The gathered books speak to the history of the world with a broad stroke: A little history of the world and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, IT are philosophical, Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe are stories, The Man who Planted Trees, Mirrors.
Over the course of the project the selections may change and grow.
Please slip a bookmark into your favorite passages. If you would like to suggest a book, another language please send your suggestions to Claire and Izzy:
When you are ready, take a seat on the stool or stand in front of the microphone. You do not need to be very close to the microphone for it to pick up your voice. If you are too close it will be too loud, and your voice will have a buzz.
To the upper left of the book of letters is a black box. Push the red button, the light will turn off and your voice will be live in the space projecting through the speakers mounted above the booth.
You may want to begin or end your session by selecting an image you are addressing with your reading.
You can signal this by pulling down on the black string adjacent to your selected image – or you can ring each or none at all.
Some are louder and work better than others.
When you are finished, turn the microphone off by pushing down on the red button, the red light will come on.
If you have taken any letters from the book to read please tuck them back into their corners in the letters book and put your selected readings away.
As you leave please draw the wool rope across the entrance behind you.
Many thanks
Ann
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