Echos
Installation, In situ, Politics, Sound

The cellars of the castle had served for 150 years as prison cells, when the castle was a women prison held by Carmelites. In the strict Carmelite order even the spoken word is prohibited.

For this installation, I assembled texts from 15 different more or less well known women from different countries who, during recent history, have been emprisoned, manly for political reasons, and who have been writing during their imprisonnement.

The texts have been read by as many different women, recorded and broadcast in the cellars. These cellars with their vaulted architecture transmit sound like in the subway or at St. Paul’s cathedral : when you speak against the vault at one end of the room, the sound is clearly audible on the other side of the room. Loudspeakers were put in each corner of the cellars, and the women’s voices seemed to come out of the walls, the stones, ghostlike.

The texts are by Rosa Luxemburg, Eva Forest, Elly Ioannidou, Petra Kraus, Ulrike Meinhof, Paola Besuchio, Nadia Mandovani, Luise Jacobsen, Mata Hari, Aung San Suu Kyi, three texts from the 1990s written by anonymous women from Tibet, China and Kurdistan, and two texts that I found written and engraved on the cell walls of the castle, one anonymous, the other from a certain Monique Lelong.