Heiße Tränen in die Stille der Nacht

In the early 1990s, dictation cassettes travel by mail between a small East German town and Vienna. They transport voices, longings, and confessions that might never have been uttered face-to-face: due to their spatial separation and a risky affair, two lovers use the dictation machine as a space for radical intimacy.

Theoretically framed by the concept of media as a "language of absence," the cassettes repair broken lines and establish a technique of connectedness within absence. The distance becomes physically tangible where the medium itself is set in motion: when messages are recorded during the car ride connecting both locations, the distance is acoustically inscribed into both the narrative and the material. The dictation cassette is thus revealed as a repository of radical subjectivity.

This communication, which was archived and analysed as part of the SONIME project (Sonic Memories: Audio Letters in Times of Migration and Mobility), can be heard during Angewandte Festival at AIL at two facing listening stations that make the spatial distance to be overcome physically experienceable. A mailbox provided on-site invites visitors to share their own thoughts and experiences while listening.