“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” writes Wittgenstein. How two artists with the willingness to correspond with each other can go beyond those limits through exchange, play, imagination. How – in the days of e-mails and compulsive texting – not to reduce correspondence to its epistolary form, seemingly dated and obsolete? Henry Fourès and Elisabeth Gutjahr revitalise it. By including all kinds of information they share in a multiple stream, thinking of the listener as a future witness of this composition: “Roles are multiple. Who is speaking, who is listening, and who is reading? Is the listener hearing the author or the reader?” By including sound moments (murmur, music) and by playing on the different levels of language, their counterpoints, approximations emerge and stimulate imagination because suddenly slip changes into promise.
In order to shape this play of the listening (Hörspiel), radio means are and will always be essential: each sound setting – sometimes tiny “acoustic sculptures” – evokes multiple images and their link to a world transforming from reality to imaginary magic.
