Echo is a reverberation of an original sound after this sound has stopped or is in the moment of evaporating. Not a background noise, it resonates and doubles a tonality, pitch, vocation. I am thinking about the experience of echoing in a particular mountain landscape, something to do with a sound being thrown, trashed towards a wall or large rock–and returning in a ghostly and consuming fashion.
you mean to say, echo is a fabrication of a doubling and a travelling sound . . . coming into being by listening.
how did Echo project then come about?
The materiality of Echo project–on and across this page–serves as a hint to what happened during a visit of the Los Angeles Art Book fair in January 2014. It was on the occasion of a prior book project, titled Prospectus, that the editorial team had been invited by the LAABF team to both present the printed matter in the format of running a book stall, and stage a discursive event at the Classroom. Out of curiosity of exploring a ‘present LA,’ that is the very surroundings and stage of the fair, we–three Londoners at the time–accepted.
ok.
Echo project charts encounters with voices and questions, some out of synch, some in dialogues; musical, conversational confrontational, and in dis/agreement. Content-wise one finds a phantom meeting around a failed or missed art book fair deal . . .
a sort of surplus of a fair (or affair)?
You could say so. An essay on the General Intellect and Financialization sets a conceptual ground for rethinking subjective freedom; an encounter with Another LA opens out a multitude of cartographies - revealing more discreet and politically dynamic movements in the urban grid; there are glimpses of Machine Project’s events, a visual story around mothers and demonology (Kathy Acker’s property deals in the UK), and more; and future materials formalized as poster texts . . .
conclude?!
In the process of getting this together Echo’s material has become a community board perhaps to be outdated in the near future, certainly mutating, expanding. Yet there is also the potential that its concerns - rather than tracing the past/present - create a ground for thinking, identifying, sharing and exchanging the specific, often microscopic or hidden, urgencies for shifts in our living environments. From the habitas, the how we inhabit spaces-places, to larger, more encompassing environments. Echo’s hope is precisely for reverberations to call into being a building for new pathways and the subjectivities required for this.
And remember, an echo m/ghostly appears unforeseen. It hits you when least expected. tune in, explore, provoke, forget, fast forward to . . . !
ms & vg, 2016
Other echoesInhabit the garden. Shall we follow? T. S. Eliot, FOUR QUARTETS, in The Complete Poems and Plays. Faber and Faber: London, Boston, 1969