This is my first week’s dispatch from the AWA residency at Villa Sträuli in Winterthur, supported by Pro Helvetia and TAKE On Art. I have enjoyed scrumptious cake with my co-residents, and fantastic home-cooked dinner with my research guide in Zürich.
Before arriving in Winterthur, my fantasies of Switzerland were limned with the Kodak patina of Yash Raj films. The skies and forests certainly live up to my imagination, but it is the quietude I register most — a thick, comforting swaddle of silence.
I strain to listen.
I hear birdsong in the morning, and in the afternoon I follow the trills and twitters with my ears to trace with my eyes the curve of a bird’s trajectory. It soars towards the high branches of a tree in the park. Leaning back on the balls of my feet to squint at the nest, I almost trip.
I teeter again on the steps up to an exhibition at the local Kunsthalle, of the Art Nouveau artist Félix Valloton, when a staff member hails me in German, then French, then English to request that I please deposit my bag in the locker. I am still finding my Winti-legs, my balance in this new geography, through negotiations of language and listening and moving.
I climb the hill to the panoramic terrace of Bäumli overlooking the city. Sitting surrounded by picnickers from far afield, I am treated to a symphony of (appropriately for a polyglot nation) multilingual murmurs through the afternoon. The aural poetics of conversation are apparent when tuned into languages I do not know. Parsing gossip from hortation, dialogue from harangue and coos from scolds, I engage in a cheeky kind of ‘critical eavesdropping’ based entirely on tone and cadence.
Later, I experienced another delightful disorientation. Walking around Winterthur’s old town, I find myself constantly cutting across the parallel streets through narrow lanes and ginnels just to understand the mobile diagrams of Google Maps in terms of four dimensions. The opulent town hall passage not only collapses distance but, when it is empty, briefly makes the era in which it was built come alive.
The ear is responsible not just for audition but also for orientation, balance and motion through its innermost, vestibular system. One dictionary definition of vestibular, “relating to empty spaces in the body that are entrances to passages or other spaces”, alludes to the connection between listening, imagination and liberation.
Working across text and podcasts, at the interstice of writing to be read and scripting to be listened to, I am interested in exploring the relationship between the visual and the verbal —that is, the ekphrastic condition — through the interplay of textual and aurality. After a week of relying on my ears, balancing, exploring empty passages and listening in—my research on the generative tension between writing and listening has begun to take shape.
