Chimerization

<p>There is no such thing as voice in literature. That is, we assign chimerical properties to characters’ voices; fictions based on voices we have heard in relation to the description of the characters’ personalities; identities we want to confer on the characters. Whilst we read and listen to this voice, it is neither true nor false. It is the product of a careful assembly of traces and features we believe represent a person – more physically even than their own body.</p> <p>‘Chimerization’ is a term Florian Hecker uses to allude to another complex operation: the artificial attribution of the properties of one voice to another. Chimerization is also the title of a complex work whose point of departure is the absence of a basic element, not only the voice, but also our relation with it: the echo. Interested anechoic chambers as particular spaces that prevent interferences in communication as well as in the phenomenon that the absence of audible reflections can have on perception and in the issuing of one’s own voice, Hecker decided to work on the text – that will act as the work’s voice – with philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. The text is read out by a wide range of authors in English, German and Persian. Voices that, nonetheless, once the piece is installed in the space, are unable to guide us through the text…</p>