Created by the Swiss playwright Julie Gilbert, the original proposal is an installation with old telephones through which the public circulates and chooses one to have a “conversation” with a writer from the collection.
When the phone rings, the audience picks up the handset and listen, for 5 minutes, to what a current playwright wrote "on behalf" of a former writer, performed live by an actress.
For this version, digital and in Spanish, we selected 4 "phones" from the original collection, translated them, and added another 4, from Argentine authors.
The 8 'telephones' are performed live by contemporary Argentine actresses.
Between July and October 2021 the first season of activations took place in Argentina, with phone calls made by the actresses to the public who signed up on the website.
Here you can find all the information and listen to the audio teasers of the phone calls.
Julie Gilbert, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf*, relates her starting point as follows:
“... we wonder why women writers and thinkers are not a regular part of our corpus, why have we read them so little? To make them known and deepen this knowledge, we imagine an audio library in motion, a literary and subjective installation, composed of invented monologues, written by contemporary authors about female writers who are no longer alive and narrated by telephone, as a call from the beyond. This library grows progressively, to constitute a collection that allows to introduce and disseminate the work of the writers and encourage people to read it. Today this collection consists of 26 'telephones' ... ”.
* "The reason why no woman, when one man in two, it seemed, was capable of making a song or a sonnet, did not write a word of that extraordinary literature, remains a cruel enigma to me."
—Virginia Woolf
Created by the Swiss playwright Julie Gilbert, the original proposal is an installation with old telephones through which the public circulates and chooses one to have a “conversation” with a writer from the collection.
When the phone rings, the audience picks up the handset and listen, for 5 minutes, to what a current playwright wrote "on behalf" of a former writer, performed live by an actress.
For this version, digital and in Spanish, we selected 4 "phones" from the original collection, translated them, and added another 4, from Argentine authors.
The 8 'telephones' are performed live by contemporary Argentine actresses.
Between July and October 2021 the first season of activations took place in Argentina, with phone calls made by the actresses to the public who signed up on the website.
Here you can find all the information and listen to the audio teasers of the phone calls.
Julie Gilbert, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf*, relates her starting point as follows:
“... we wonder why women writers and thinkers are not a regular part of our corpus, why have we read them so little? To make them known and deepen this knowledge, we imagine an audio library in motion, a literary and subjective installation, composed of invented monologues, written by contemporary authors about female writers who are no longer alive and narrated by telephone, as a call from the beyond. This library grows progressively, to constitute a collection that allows to introduce and disseminate the work of the writers and encourage people to read it. Today this collection consists of 26 'telephones' ... ”.
* "The reason why no woman, when one man in two, it seemed, was capable of making a song or a sonnet, did not write a word of that extraordinary literature, remains a cruel enigma to me."
—Virginia Woolf
© 2021