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—archived and analysed as part of the “SONIME project (Sonic Memories: Audio Letters in Times of Migration and Mobility)”—can be heard 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.