What do you see from y(our) window?

--- is a network of phone calls, connecting strangers across the world, in collaboration with Shivani Shah.

With the phone pressed against our ears, we listen as the sound of another’s voice travels to reach us in our home. In describing what we see - the growing tree, the open window, the fat cat balancing on the wall - a space between imagination and reality is created within the call. As we listen, we imagine the world of the other. As we listen, we create a momentary map of the spaces that surround each other - not through lines, shapes and forms - but through words, silences, tones, inflections, voice textures, pauses and breaths. As we listen, the phone in our ear, to the breaths and voice of the other, we find an intimacy, a connection. In our isolated states, from our bedrooms, we look out and listen across worlds, connecting with each other and travelling across the spaces that surround us.

Each phone call becomes part of a chain, connecting another to another, until we return to the beginning again, forming a circle of calls. Our spaces merge, overlap, intertwine with yours. Each description influences the next. We draw connections between distant lands and times as similarities, relations, solidarities and differences emerge. The transitory, spoken map collapses distance as we traverse the human voice.

The window offers us a space of curiosity; a space of mutual learning and dialogue. Recognising the other at the end of the line, the individual is transformed into an ephemeral collective performed in this moment across voices and bodies connected by telephone wires.

Blurring the strict boundaries of our space and yours, the experience hopes to understand our spaces not as isolated units but as layers of woven experiences. Each phone call, an intimate space between two strangers, holds the performance within itself. Existing in the exact moment of exchange, we invite you to travel through a spoken map to another place, imagined as you listen with the phone against your ear.

Conversations layer over each other where ‘my’ window becomes ‘your’ window, ‘my’ eyes go up as ‘yours’ go down, expanding ‘my’ space to y(ours). Through languages, breaths, prepositions and tonal fluctuations the moment of the call creates a temporary connection across bodies and voices across different times and space.





// bibliography


2020 - ongoing


Mark