Laboratory

PHILOLAB: ECHOSPACE

with Echoraum

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The performance starts from Derrida’s book “The Postcard”, a post-modern epistolary novel, which contains countless postcards that give no clue who might have written them or whom they address. This literary form results from Derrida’s understanding of writing as trace: that is to say, as a remaining mark which nevertheless cannot be re-traced to its author. Writing and the postcard stay behind, without revealing its origin or destination. 

The Echospace proposes a method – a “writing-game” – that explores possibilities of a commonly shared writing practice: Between the participants, a sequence is drawn by lot. This procedure makes it possible to include chance, being a central aspect of any writing, as a productive moment of the writing process. Participant No. 1 produces a starting text and sends it to the game master. The game master then forwards this text to participant No. 2 who must answer without knowing, whom she is addressing and to whom her own text will be sent. This way the Echospace explores the conditions of an ethics of writing in the sense of Derrida and others, which asks the question what it means to answer “adequately”. At the GLOBART academy the thus commonly produced text will be read aloud and presented to the audience. It is only now that the participants realize, whom they have written to – and whether and in which way their own texts have been answered. 

Thereby, a space is created, in which multiple voices and texts meet. The role model for this space is the house of Fama as it is described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; an in-between space, where heterogeneous voices cross, rub against each other, differentiate from another, change, chain up, separate again and vanish. Therefore the Echospace stands in contrast to the Echobubble, which only generates a unison in which differences are evened out, normalized, rendered inaudible.