The Wapping Project – Resonance 1

Resonance 1

Introduction 2 Gareth Evans Stations: A Brief Diary of a Long Concern with images by Karen Stuke 6 Alia Trabucco Zerán La última palabra 26 Alia Trabucco Zerán The Last Word Translated by Sophie Hughes 32 Laura Cannell Conversing with Resonance 39 Contributors 46

Resonance 1

Resonance 1 is the first part of a double publication looking at ideas around resonance — a theme we are working with throughout 2019 / 20. The starting point to this series of commissions, exhibitions and events is our former building — Wapping Hydraulic Power Station — and its Boiler House which was home to our ideas and ideas of many artists and designers we worked with.

Each installation exhibited there responded to the unique characteristics of that space — its brick walls, its concrete floor, the bottoms of the water tanks forming its ceiling, its cathedral-like arches, the marks left by former workers and other artists, the elements brought in by the architect during the restoration, its geography, its history and the ever-present chill which at times made breaths visible.

The Boiler House resonates on many levels and is present in every commission produced over two decades working with that space. Without the physicality of the building to bounce off ideas, we are searching for different resonances:

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BET�EEN PEOPL� A�D P�ACES BODIES A�D SPAC� IDEAS CUL�URES LA�GUAGES �ORDS PAS�, PRESEN� A�D

�UTURE

EAST, WEST, �ORT� A�D SOUTH �A�IVE A�D FOREI�N LOUD A�D �U�ET RE�E�BERED A�D

�ORGOTTEN

The now nomadic The Wapping Project says farewell to our former resonance box and moves on with a freedom to bounce off uncontained. Roll, leap, hurdle, rise, surge, rocket, mount, gather, spill, sip in, and carry on. As an idea always in transition, it feels at home outside bricks and mortar, inside a metaphorical resonance box that does not threaten to become an echo chamber.

In his essay Stations: A Brief Diary of a Long Concern Gareth Evans writes from a body of work by Berlin-based photographer Karen Stuke commissioned by The Wapping Project in 2013 for one of the final exhibitions within the Boiler House and the Coal Store at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. In the heat of the hottest day recorded to date in the UK, Gareth creates a text in fragments, weaving lines found online searching for ‘Sebald Austerlitz resonance’ with overheard voices and reflections on language, place, extinction and the state of the world. Every image is a ghost, he writes in the opening.

His essay is interspersed with Karen’s ghostly, large format pinhole images that follow the journey of W.G. Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz uncovering his forgotten past of a Jewish child brought to the UK on a Kindertransport from Prague. This publication coincides with the opening of Wandelhalle exhibition restaging the 2013 commission at the Kommunale Galerie, Berlin, on the 1 September 2019 — eighty years since the last Kindertransport left Germany on the day when Germany invaded Poland.

La última palabra (The Last Word), a short story by Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán, published in the original in Spanish alongside the English translation by Sophie Hughes, looks at the childhood game of resonances and echoes called The Telephone in Chile, The Broken Telephone in Argentina, and Chinese Whisperers in the UK. The story came about from an obsessive image that formed in Alia’s mind — an image of blushing — as a result of thinking about the resounding of words. What is blushing? How come words can cause something as visual as blushing? Is blushing the echo of words in our bodies? Is blushing the result of a word that, all of a sudden, wants to have a physical presence?

The final piece in this volume is Conversing with Resonance by composer, violinist and double recorders player Laura Cannell reflecting on her recent commission — a music album Waters Deep Cathedral recorded in the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station

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earlier this year. She conversed with the long reverb, the damp air, the chill and the stories contained within the building.

If I do this, will you fight back? will you agree? will you laugh at me? will you change my pitch?

Through the album, we are taking the resonance of that space with us forever in Laura’s music. The work will premiere on 3 November 2019 during the Deep Minimalism festival at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre in London, and the album will be released in 2020.

Resonance 2 will be published in March 2020 to coincide with the opening of an exhibition of new commissions from five artists responding to the theme resonance — Rawan Al Mahrouqi, Safa Balushi, Ruqaiya Al Balushi, Riham Noor Al Zadjali and Elina Brotherus — at Stal Gallery in Muscat, Oman.

Marta Michalowska and Thomas Zanon-Larcher Directors of The Wapping Project

Gareth Evans Stations: A Brief Diary of a Long Concern In memoriam W.G. Sebald, in what should have been his 75th year

with images by Karen Stuke from the body of work After Sebald’s Austerlitz, 2013

Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstraction and not against anything.

— Wendell Berry, from Distant Neighbours Every image is a ghost.

Last night there was a fever dream of granite, the rock face sheer, and the tents of the unsheltered pinned in at staggered tiers, with mechanisms of rope and pulley to find precarious rest.

What have we done?

On the hottest day of the year — to date — as the rising mercury developed a photograph of itself in the solid air, I searched online for a relationship1.

The season was bending the tracks.

The playground stopped in this so total heat. The interior of a vehicle, its windows sealed as lips before some terrible excess.

The hide of certain trees, dried to a dead skin’s flank. The glue of mounting heat on every swollen surface, and in the air a white noise of distress. The heat’s complete control, buckle, warp, a war, wearing all things down. Security is standing, motionless in haze, hand out steady on a plastic chair, it burns; vibration, dizzy, waver, hum; the clock melts down; the future's here, already, and of course.

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All the summer animals, nervous as an anxious wait, lost in their hothouse drowse, cannot find the cool room that they will, clear of growing unrest in the day.

From here, five storeys high, the sky offered its weathers more familiar out at sea, sudden veer and slant, wayward winds and scent of storm among the solar stifle.

Circular Histories: The Contemporary Resonance of WG Sebald Older than the chair, but younger than the floor, he lay in late, steamed light like water passing over him at depth.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee!

Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

— Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick (Chapter 58: Brit)

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the online search was for ‘Sebald Austerlitz resonance’. The italicised lines are from the first page of results. The italicised ‘found poem’ is made up of the titles of those results.

Overheard — The numerous stories of the morning’s news open wide their wounds: a woman rammed down randomly in Crete, raped and dumped into a cave ventilation shaft to die over days, far from any aid; a loved scientist, on the island for a conference / & The Amazon in constant pillage — faster faster more more — now tribal leaders targeted, territories primed for greater mass incursion /

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They all say, the commentators, we are way back in the ’30s; watch the fascists on the march, count the populists, their masses doped to follow; but look at this: remember giant Brecht, ‘to Those Born Later’: Truly, I live in dark times! …

What kind of times are they, when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors?

All change! Refuse to speak of forests and you’re caught in tract denial. Species of the crisis proliferate, the only kind that are; and all the human pains, the huge calamities, are shadowed over by the drone of our own nature, killing nature; the threat we cannot target, so it seems, is our own being, our will towards erasure, our Ahabian pursuit, hunter and the hunted, the prey ourselves and all around us, all we need to live.

While any understanding of how we might react rushes like the universe away from us at speed.

Distance negates responsibility.

– Guy Davenport, from A Letter to the Masterbuilder Overheard — Leaving London Fields, a small child to her mother: Mummy, what does traumatise mean?

Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass: is this what we have become? A world of malady presided over by the black clock of Extinction Rebellion? (Poor Bruno Schulz — go find online — shot walking home with a loaf of bread…) There’s more, and much confusion here: your rod and your staff they (are meant to) comfort me. You are not my shepherd, you are my doctor: your stick, your symbol snake-entwined. Knowledge and something to beat me with: bite into my modified apple.

For me one snake is not enough. I blame — as with so much else — the American military. Here is what we need, some magic in the mix: “The caduceus is the traditional symbol of Hermes and features two snakes winding around an often winged staff. It is often mistakenly used as a symbol of medicine instead of

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the Rod of Asclepius, especially in the United States. The twosnake caduceus design has ancient and consistent associations with trade, eloquence, negotiation, alchemy and wisdom.” …and sense of resonance that overtakes a reader when enveloped in a book…

What is culture for at such a time?

John Berger always tested what he did by this: a love poem, a watercolour of an iris, an essay about Morandi, a story with his mother in Lisboa, all had to be of use in some way beyond his own need to keep creating. He said he would not publish anything — words in any form, or any drawing — if he did not feel that it had been informed by, and in some way might assist, tangentially or face to face, the lived experience of the majority world. He meant the struggle of the poor and the constantly oppressed against injustice, power, abuse. Now ‘the majority world’ must also encompass what it has always properly held — the planetary ecology entire, and all that dwells within it.

Green dependence. …the symbolic resonances of the squirrels observed by Austerlitz in Prague…

Overheard — How is it in the north?

— I think it is the future. It feels well uncertain.

Always useful that; keep your options open.

— They are not mine; they’re larger forces working.

Do you sense it spreading? Might it reach us?

— They say, the rumours are, the compass rose has blossomed to all margins.

How is it then the north is not yet south?

Here again there are resonances, which seem to float without meaning…

Language: site of awful harsh proposal, obscuring known effects, a site of damage, allowing such results; how can we even bear to hear, let alone to read…

Should we now just list it all? The catalogues of clear and vast collapse, naming as a witness, the record of remembered things… does the well-made line add anything to this? Is the untellable story of all that is lost not tragically complete inside the names?

Language: site of the most articulate and rigorous dissent, revealing the effects, a site of just proposal, recognition, joy, how could we not want to listen loud, read on… because its historical resonance continually pulls us away…

The last known speaker of a language2 is talking to the void The last bird of its kind is singing its song to a mate that no longer is …a resonance as individual objects that affect Austerlitz as he encounters them…

Last things the Kauai O’o bird Last places the modern art of memory

a place in the country a terrible pleasure trauma obscura in transit

a child refugee forever just occurring Two men in a yard of dust are staring at a large, black, wheeled steel bin. They circle it as you would a town to which you have laid long and strenuous siege, seeking points of weakness and, in so pressing, finding only those deep in yourself, and worn out by the act. The bin, monolith, is silent as the tomb you know will come. Its lips are sealed. Bin there. Relentless as a lawn, it persists. Despite the formalities of their professional engagement with the bin, they are broken by its refusals on a level far more personal than that of the merely employed.

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Done that. They wish for the sliver of ice in the heart that certain writers have declared is necessary adequately, fully, truthfully to observe the reality of things. Wayward, windblown, paltry flames: this is what they feel they have become, in light of the bin and its moulded nullity. Even if they applied said fire direct unto its flank, towards its brazen muted challenge, they know it would out-thrive them. Let us leave the scene at this sad moment; but let us not forget them, standing for us all in such a venture, seeking to endure against the waste we’ve made. …visionality of these images and their radical resonances. Sebaldian...

On the 11 January 2010 Will Self gave the first BCLT Sebald Lecture at the British Library. In this presentation, Self considers Sebald’s reading of the Holocaust not only as a uniquely and industrially murderous act against a specific human population but its role as part of an even wider tendency to destruction throughout human history. He proposes that, for Sebald at the time of his writing, “the Holocaust is still happening”, whether in the guise of other genocides or, more absolutely, in the form of environmental erasure.

This will to chaos, disorder, unravelling, is not inevitable, but neither is it only or pre-eminently historic, of course. In expressing this as profoundly as he did, Sebald joins Melville and his own admired contemporary László Krasznahorkai in perceiving reality as primarily catastrophic.

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find this online: ‘List of last known speakers of languages’ and read this: Poetry from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry from Endangered Languages (ed. Chris

McCabe) and published 5 September 2019 (which is the UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages)

For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship? Great God, where is the ship?”

— Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick (Chapter 135: The Chase, Third Day) It does not recognise a line but cycles through all eras; progression, not progress, is what we shoulder as a result, just as a point on a wheel turns from its touching of the earth to a polar opposite somewhere nearer cloud, only to tumble groundwards once again, as ever…

…and his images, rich in mystery, or resonant with pathos, are what linger…

It is not by chance that at the heart of Krasznahorkai’s astonishing third novel The Melancholy of Resistance (adapted by the author for the equally remarkable film Werckmeister Harmonies) lies the body of a great whale, toured through the desolate back-lands and instigating obscure unrest by its presence in remote town squares (Krasznahorkai’s most recent books in English stalk Melville in fact and fiction).

Each writer appreciates that the potency of culture — regardless of medium, form or genre — lies in its ability to harness the resonance of motifs as they operate, mutate, accumulate and shift across time, space and place.

From the Latin: resonantia “echo”, from resonare “to sound again” Activating the temporal and the spatial elements gives not only presence but purpose to the resonance. This purpose is registered in place, which might be thought of as spatially precise time (the boundaries between and distinction of the these two axes are increasingly in doubt). …hence the resonance of his riddle-like conception...

Rupert Sheldrake’s compelling but challenging concept of ‘morphic resonance’ is of core relevance here. It “is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems… The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future” (from his website).

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Does our hope, if hope we have, any hope at all, rest in this? In some as yet unsigned retrieval to counter the collapse?

The boat is listing. Once this meant desire, a leaning towards the wished. The vessel now is tipping, on the cusp to go. Rush, we must, to stand with and close and for.

Your salt and your upheaval your continental edge and estuarine your reach such heat there is a form of fire inside the standing air turn and smile with all your mouths whisper first then cry

As in the desert, we must not cast the date stone into embers, but save it for the soil. Seeds must not be wasted.

As in the desert, we must take for eating only seven olives (eight speaks greed, six pride).

As in the desert, we must conjure water in the head.

What is the opposite of ocean?

In a simpler future, if future there will be, our relationship to things must shift: we know this in our marrow. Our self-declared ‘advanced’ late capitalist society forces upon everyone within it a resource footprint as wide as the planet, whether hands-free digital nomad or disabled single parent, not waving but drowning in a benighted cul-de-sac. The only difference lies in

the nature, profligacy, ‘cost’ and visibility of the things each uses. A privileged life declaring its antipathy to ‘materialism’ displaces the stuff it needs out of sight onto service providers.

The poor know stuff is central: reuse, repair, make-do. Our necessarily ‘poor’ collective future will mean stuff is sourced and present locally, is shared and is adaptable. We will move from form to function or be damned. The best, of course, are both: a spoon cannot be bettered in either of the camps.

No, not desert.

Place and purpose: locally engaged, but porous to the planet’s broader plains. Then, as now, we always and earnestly trust that it will — should — be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. So it goes.

Mountain. …on a specifically personal resonance for the filmmaker…

Certainly, it is easier for light to pass through a pinhole than it is for us to undo the carnage of centuries. At an unfathomable distance in time from where we are now3, all that can be said, if lips to speak there are, is that beauty was here once. This — and this, and this — happened and never will again. For better and for worse.

What is to be done…

25.7.19, a day of note for the record

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find this online: ‘Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time’

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Wandelhalle after Sebald’s Austerlitz

by Karen Stuke

Kommunale Galerie Berlin Hohenzollerndamm 176 10713 Berlin Preview Sunday 1 September 2019, noon Exhibition continues until 27 October 2019

The Wapping Project in partnership with Kommunale Galerie Berlin and PhotoWerkBerlin restages its 2013 commission by German artist Karen Stuke responding to W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece Austerlitz (2001). The novel is one of literature’s most haunting meditations on time, loss and retrieval. It tells the story of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who, aged five, was sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents in Wales. As he rediscovers his past, Austerlitz embarks on a journey through time and space, from midtwentieth century mitte-Europa to contemporary England.

Stuke, an accomplished photographer in the use of the pinhole camera, followed this journey, cross-referencing information from the book with maps and records. At the crossroad between fact and fiction, she found, when they existed, the places of Austerlitz’s story: the Prague gymnasium from which his mother was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the railway journey followed by the Kindertransport, his house in Mile End… The resulting photographs, all taken with her handcrafted pinhole camera, are the work of light, time and memory. Elusive images created by aggregated traces of light, they evoke fuzzy memories, and justly lend themselves to both the layers and recesses of Austerlitz’ mind and Sebald’s narrative.

This body of work by Karen Stuke, originally titled Stuke — After Sebald’s Austerlitz, was commissioned by The Wapping Project with funding from the Women’s Playhouse Trust. It was first exhibited in Wapping, London, from 12 October to 10 November 2013.

The exhibition Wandelhalle is presented under the patronage of the British Ambassador to Berlin Sir Sebastian Wood.

Alia Trabucco Zerán La última palabra

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El juego empieza cuando el círculo se cierra. Cuando cada uno escoge una silla y la arrastra a su nuevo lugar. Las patas de metal chirrían contra el piso, algunas se caen, la profesora entre gritos exige silencio. Los niños tienen siete años y esas sillas son demasiado grandes para ellos. En un tiempo sí llenarán la horma, pero ahora, este día, las puntas de sus pies apenas rozan el suelo.

Con un aplauso la profesora anuncia que está por comenzar. Las voces se apagan, la esperan ansiosos. Son treinta niños en un círculo perfecto. Treinta niños que oyen las reglas con atención. La primera: escuchar. La segunda: repetir. Es un juego muy sencillo. Los niños asienten, están preparados. La profesora también está lista. Carraspea, se humedece los labios, alza los ojos al techo. Parece buscar la palabra allá arriba, entre muchas, entre todas, y cuando finalmente la encuentra, sonríe.

El juego se inicia una vez más.

La profesora inclina su cabeza para acercarse al niño que está a su derecha. Él será el primero en escuchar la palabra.

El primero en repetirla. Le seguirá otro y otro y otro más, hasta llegar al final. Los círculos, supuestamente, no tienen un final.

Son infinitos, excepto este. Este círculo tiene un principio, un medio y al final hay una niña. Está a la izquierda de la profesora.

Se muerde constantemente las uñas. Ha decidido dejar de hablar. Ella será la encargada de pronunciar la palabra secreta.

Es la última niña. Y esa niña soy yo.

Se mueve hacia delante para ver el espacio entre la profesora y el primero. Esos pocos centímetros entre la boca y el oído, esa zona vacía que las letras colmarán en un momento. El recorrido es simple, es circular: boca, oído, boca. Un murmullo crece en la sala. Todos quieren oír la palabra, conocerla. La niña intenta leer en los labios alguna sílaba que le dé una pista. A veces cree verla en el vapor que brota del interior de las bocas.

Esta mañana hubo otra helada. El pasto amaneció blanco y crujiente y las sillas muy frías. La profesora intentó encender la estufa pero no lo consiguió. Dijo que estaba mala, que la arreglarían, pero Pablo, que se sienta a su lado, dice que ya no hay salida. Que muy pronto se les congelarán los dedos y se desprenderán de las manos.

Pablo tiene la camisa sucia, las uñas negras, el pelo cortado al ras y comparte su mesa con la última niña. A ella no le gusta ese lugar, no le gusta el polvo de la tiza, tampoco Pablo, ni los gritos, ni el frío que asoma blanco por las bocas. El juego, en cambio, sí le gusta. Escuchar y repetir. Hablar, qué tal difícil puede ser.

La profesora la forzó a sentarse junto a Pablo el primer día de clases. Ella estaba al fondo de la sala, atrás, cuando escuchó su apellido. La voz le ordenó que juntara sus cosas, que caminara rápido al frente. Y la niña acogió ese castigo como si en verdad lo mereciera. Abandonó su puesto en silencio y se sentó en primera fila. Allí recibió los puntapiés en las canillas, los tirones de pelo cada mañana. Una niña tranquila será una buena influencia, decretó la voz. Aquietará a ese niño distraído, al niño problema. Sin saberlo la profesora cometió un error. Nada, nunca, tranquilizaría a ese niño. El tiempo lo volverá aún más alto, más robusto, la voz más grave y estridente. Cada año ocupará un poco más de espacio en este mundo. A los diez será mucho más fuerte que a los nueve.

A los once mucho más grande que a los diez. A los quince entenderá que puede romper de un puñetazo una nariz. A los veinte comprobará que puede romper mucho más que eso.

Y a los treinta, finalmente, se romperá a sí mismo. El choque dejará sin luz a tres cuadras completas. Pero al fin, esa noche, Pablo se calmará.

La niña tiene esos pensamientos con frecuencia. Narices rotas. Largas agonías. Futuros donde cada persona recibe exactamente lo que merece. Pablo, por ejemplo, merece crecer, chocar y que su cuerpo se quiebre en mil pedazos. Y también ella merece morir. Pablo se lo repite día tras día. Que vaya pensando en su causa de muerte. Congelada, sugiere él. Ahogada en el fondo del mar. De un pelotazo en la cabeza. Le dice que lo decida cuanto antes; es muy importante cómo morir.

La palabra sigue su recorrido. Ya ha pasado por diez bocas y falta menos, mucho menos, para que alcance la suya. Siente su saliva espesarse, volverse ácida y tibia. Pablo, mientras tanto, se mueve sin cesar. La profesora le ordena que se calme pero sabe que es inútil. También es inútil la pastilla que le dan por las mañanas. Se llama Ritalín y adormece las yemas de los dedos. Pablo finge tragársela pero luego se la pasa, humedecida, por debajo de la mesa. No digas nada, le advierte, mientras la niña, obediente, se la introduce en la boca. La pastilla se desvanece sobre su lengua y ella espera desaparecer, pero solo siente un hormigueo y una tristeza blanda y ancha. Y con la tristeza la asaltan esas ideas extrañas. Ideas como que Pablo, en el futuro, estrellará sus dientes contra un parabrisas.

O que el cuerpo, por dentro, no tiene sombra ni luz. O que un día despertará y todos habrán enmudecido.

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Es curioso este juego, diferente a los demás. Sin ganadores, sin perdedores. El único objetivo es mantener la palabra intacta. Comprobar que las letras no se desgastan, que su paso por las bocas no las transforman. Cada mañana el curso escoge un nuevo juego. Para que nos conozcamos, dice la profesora. Para que nos hagamos amigos. Ya han jugado a las escondidas y a la silla musical. Y ahora la niña está convencida de que han elegido ese juego para ella. La profesora insistió en que fuera la última, en que ella se sentara a su izquierda. Y ahí está, la última niña, paralizada por la idea de hablar, de que tantos ojos la escudriñen. Quisiera irse lejos, afuera. Salir de esa sala, de sí misma. Detesta que los otros se rían y se pasen la palabra por la boca. Se pregunta cuál de todas puede ser: lámpara, humedad, cemento, edificio. Algo que la profesora vio allá arriba, cuando alzó la vista y sonrió. O quizá la palabra secreta sea escarcha, eso debe ser. Mal que mal se tiñe de blanco cada vez que abandona una boca. Oído, boca, oído, boca. Ya ha recorrido la mitad de la sala. Muy pronto será su turno y ya no habrá escapatoria.

A su lado, Pablo se rasca la cabeza, silba y se sacude en pequeños espasmos. Es tartamudo por la misma razón. La agitación de sus brazos y piernas causa el respingo de las letras. Go-go-gorda, le dice. Pu-pu-puta. Todos los cuadernos de la niña tienen borrones por su culpa. Mensajes que Pablo le envía sin necesidad de tocar el lápiz. Zarandea su pierna y causa un temblor en el pupitre que comparten. El niño y la niña.

El tonto y la lista. El bruto y la muda. Así le dicen a ella, la muda.

Pero en su mente, en silencio, ella habla todo el tiempo. A veces, incluso, mueve los labios sin querer. Contesta, pregunta, es un diálogo sin fin. Entonces Pablo se acerca, la golpea con el codo y dice: con quién hablas, to-to-tonta. Con quién peleas, ra-ra-rara. Ella no contesta en voz alta, prefiere no escuchar su propia voz. De ese modo nadie podrá decir nada sobre ella. Y ella, a su vez, no dirá lo que teme decir.

Ya van veinte niños. Falta cada vez menos y Pablo se agita cada vez más. Está a su izquierda en el círculo y se balancea hasta casi perder el equilibrio. A la niña le asusta ese vaivén.

Imagina que la silla colapsa y se oye un golpe. Paf. Entonces, sobre el suelo, se dibuja un charco de sangre que crece y crece hasta rozarle los pies. La palabra, mientras tanto, avanza como si hubiera perdido letras o sílabas y ahora fuese mucho más corta: techo, nube, niña, muda. Los que ya la escucharon

no aguantan más. Murmuran, se distraen, pero Pablo es el peor.

Pablo larga gritos y gruñidos para que nadie pueda oír la palabra verdadera. Para así arruinar el juego.

Faltan siete, seis. El murmullo se transforma en ruido y finalmente en estruendo. La profesora pierde la paciencia. Se gira, se dirige a Pablo y le advierte que si no se calla de inmediato lo va a castigar. Sin recreo, dice. Sin almuerzo. Sin amigos.

Sin pastilla. Sin. Todavía no entiende que Pablo no puede parar.

No sabe parar. La niña, en tanto, sabe que morirá. Se lo anunció Pablo al oído. Que una de estas noches, de tanto estar callada, ya no podrá salir de ahí. Se quedará encerrada en una tumba oscura y muda. Y para prepararse, porque es preciso estar lista, la niña juega el juego de morirse. En el medio del alboroto cierra los ojos, aprieta los dientes y aguanta la respiración lo más posible. Lo que no suena no existe, se repite entonces, lo que no suena no está. Pero luego oye su propio latido y entonces vuelve a respirar.

La palabra continúa su rumbo, ya falta muy poco. Cinco bocas, cuatro, tres. Se oyen grititos ahogados, impacientes. La niña sabe que no hay vuelta atrás. Faltan solo dos y Pablo ya no puede contenerse. Reclina su cuerpo sobre la silla, la alza hasta apoyarse sobre las patas traseras y se deja caer. La palabra lo alcanza en ese instante. Entra por su oído y se queda ahí, atascada. Él frunce el ceño, se muerde el labio, piensa.

Este no es un juego de pensar. Escuchar y repetir, eso es todo lo que Pablo debe hacer y sin embargo no lo hace. Los otros niños lo apuran. Incluso la profesora lo apura. Le gritan que siga, que la diga de una vez. La niña también quiere gritar.

Gritar más fuerte que nadie. Lo intenta, por qué no. Hincha su pecho, separa los labios pero las otras voces se le meten dentro y ese grito ajeno la estremece.

Pablo tiene la palabra y ahora sonríe. Una mueca falsa, que a la niña le causa temor. El miedo le seca la boca, la despierta. Se siente más alerta que nunca. Viva, eso es. Se pregunta si ese juego será una excusa para distraerlos. Para que no sientan el frío endureciendo sus manos. Las uñas azules, los dedos mutilados en el suelo. Ese pensamiento la distrae.

Siente todavía más terror. Y Pablo, como si supiera, aprovecha esa distracción. Inclina su cabeza a la derecha, forma un túnel con sus manos y se acerca a su oído. La palabra se desprende de sus labios y alcanza a la niña. Ella la entiende con absoluta claridad. La conoce. Un golpe de calor trepa desde su pecho

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hasta su cara. Como si esa palabra se volviera fuego en su cuerpo. Como si en el medio de esa sala, la niña ardiera.

A su alrededor escucha gritos. Que la diga, que la diga. Ella es una niña obediente, buena. Conoce las reglas del juego.

La primera: escuchar. La segunda: repetir. Sus labios se mueven, no puede evitarlo. Pronuncian sin sonido la palabra . Y la repite dos veces, como que ha escuchado: , . Entonces, distraída en su si ensayara: murmullo, siente un golpe en la nuca. Es Pablo, los ojos le brillan. Sabe que sólo él y ella comparten la palabra. Esa palabra vergonzosa que ella debe revelar. El juego lo ordena. Los gritos lo ordenan. Y ella es una niña que hace lo que se le ordena.

Sin pensarlo más se pone de pie, da dos pasos y se detiene en el medio del círculo. Siente la garganta agarrotada, las palmas húmedas, la boca amarga. Los niños a su alrededor guardan silencio. No recordaban a esa niña, pero ahora, de pronto, todos saben quién es. Tiene las manos empuñadas, el pelo atado en dos trenzas, los zapatos sin lustrar y el corazón enloquecido. Y tiene, además, los párpados cerrados. No ver para no ser vista; si tan solo fuera así de simple. Nadie se atreve a interrumpirla. Todos quieren oír la palabra, la última, la que esa niña ha escuchado y la que ahora debe repetir. Ella traga, toma aire, y se fuerza a abrir los ojos. Ve que la estufa está apagada. Afuera cae una llovizna. No sabe qué hacer.

Alza la vista con la esperanza de hallar una pista allá arriba. El techo es blanco, vacío, y ese vacío le da su respuesta. Es tan sencillo, tan simple mentir. Basta cambiar un nombre, una palabra nada más.

La niña duda, lo piensa, pero en cuanto separa los labios ya no puede atajar su propia voz. Es como los cuerpos en el agua. Cuando se dan impulso, cuando se zambullen, ya no es posible detenerlos. Ya no es posible recobrar la palabra que ha salido de su boca. Suena como si no fuera suya, como si naciera una nueva voz. Los niños la escuchan atentos y tras un titubeo estalla la risa. Las carcajadas parecen gritos, aullidos salvajes y agudos. Ya nadie la mira. Todos, también ella, clavan sus ojos en Pablo. Y todos, en un coro, repiten la última palabra: Ritalín, Ritalín. La pastilla es amarga, ínfima, y esta vez surte efecto. Pablo la mira, perplejo, su cara cada vez más roja. Ahora él está mudo. Al fin está quieto.

Alia Trabucco Zerán The Last Word

Translated

by Sophie Hughes

The game begins when the circle closes. When everyone takes a chair and drags it to its new place. Metal feet scrape against the floor, some of the chairs fall, the teacher calls for silence above the noise. The children are seven years old and those chairs are too big for them. It won’t be long before they grow into them, but right now, today, the tips of their toes barely reach the floor.

With a clap the teacher announces that it’s time to start.

The voices settle down, the children await her instructions impatiently. There are thirty of them in a perfect circle. Thirty children paying close attention to the rules. The first: to listen.

The second: to repeat. It’s a very simple game. The children

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nod, they’re ready. The teacher is too. She clears her throat, licks her lips, and looks up to the ceiling. She seems to be searching for the word up there, one word among many, among all the words, and when at last she finds it, she smiles. The game can begin.

The teacher leans in towards the boy to her right. He will be the first to hear the word. The first to repeat it. After him there’ll come another and another and another, until it reaches the end. Circles, so they say, have no end. They are infinite. But not this one. This circle has a beginning, a middle, and at the end there is a girl. She is sitting on the teacher’s left, steadily biting her nails. Some time ago, she decided to stop talking.

Today it is her job to announce the secret word. She is the last girl. And that girl is me.

She leans forwards to watch the space between the teacher and the first boy. Those few centimetres between her mouth and his ear, that empty space which, any moment now, will be flooded with letters. It’s a straightforward, circular course: mouth, ear, mouth. The room hums with anticipation.

Everyone wants to hear the word, to know what it is. She tries to lip-read some syllable that might give her a clue. Every now and then she thinks she sees it on the children’s breath as it spills from inside their mouths. This morning they woke to another frost. The grass dawned white and crisp and their seats were ice cold. The teacher tried to turn on the heater but to no avail. She said it was broken, that they’d fix it, but Pablo, who sits next to the girl, tells her they’re doomed. He says pretty soon their fingers will freeze and drop off.

Pablo’s shirt is dirty, his nails are black, his head is shaved and he shares a desk with the last girl. She doesn’t like that place, she doesn’t like the chalk dust, or Pablo, or the shouting, or the white cold blown from their mouths. The game, on the other hand, she does like. Listening and repeating. Speaking, how hard can it be.

The teacher made her sit next to Pablo on the first day of school. She was at the other end of the classroom, at the back, when she heard her surname. The voice told her to collect her things and come quickly to the front. And the girl accepted that punishment as if she really deserved it. She left her place in silence and sat down in the front row. There, each morning, she was kicked in the shin and had her hair pulled. A nice quiet girl will be a good influence, the voice ruled. She’ll have a calming

effect on that rowdy boy, on the problem child. Little does the teacher know she is wrong. It will take a lot more than that to calm down the boy. Time will make him taller, broader, his voice deeper and brasher. With each passing year he will take up more space in the world. At age ten he will be much stronger than at nine. By age eleven, he will be significantly taller than at ten. By the time he is fifteen he will have understood that he can break a nose with his bare fist. At twenty he will discover that he can break much more than that. And by thirty, finally, he’ll break himself. The collision will leave three whole streets without power. But at last, that night, Pablo will have calmed down.

The girl often has thoughts like these. Broken noses. Long, drawn-out deaths. Futures in which every single person gets exactly what they deserve. Pablo, for example, deserves to grow up, crash his car and be smashed to pieces. And she deserves to die too Pablo tells her as much, day in, day out. He tells her she should start thinking about how. Freezing to death, he suggests. Drowning at the bottom of the sea. A blow to the back of the head. He tells her she’d better make up her mind as soon as possible; how you die matters.

The word continues along its course. It has passed through ten mouths, which means there are now fewer, far fewer, before it reaches hers. She feels the saliva in her mouth thicken, go warm and sour. Pablo, meanwhile, won’t stop fidgeting. The teacher tells him to settle down but it’s useless. Equally useless is the pill they give him each morning. It’s called Ritalin and it numbs the tips of your fingers. Pablo pretends to swallow it but then passes it, wet, under the table to her. Don’t say a word, he warns her, and the girl obediently puts it in her mouth. The pill dissolves on her tongue and she waits to disappear with it, but she only feels a tingling and a soft, expansive sadness. And in her sadness she is struck by strange ideas. Ideas like how Pablo, in the future, will crack all his teeth against a windshield.

Or how inside the body there is no light or shade. Or how one day she’ll wake up and everyone will have lost their voice.

It’s strange this game, different from the rest. No winners, no losers. The sole object is to keep the word intact. Ensure that the letters don’t wear out, that their passage from mouth to mouth doesn’t change them. Each morning at the start of term the class chooses a new game. To get to know one another, the teacher says. To make friends. They’ve already played hide and seek and musical chairs. And now the girl is

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convinced they have chosen this game for her. The teacher insisted that the girl went last, that she sat to her left. And there she is, the last child, paralysed by the very idea of speaking, and by all those eyes on her. She would like to go outside, far, far away. Outside of that classroom, outside of herself. She detests how the others giggle as they pass the word from mouth to mouth. She wonders what it could be: ‘striplight’, ‘building’, ‘humidity’, ‘ceiling’. Something the teacher saw up there, when she looked up and smiled. Or maybe the secret word is ‘frost’. At least that’s what it should be — the glacial air tints the word white each time it leaves a mouth. Ear, mouth, ear, mouth. It has now made its way around half the room. Soon enough it will be her turn and there’ll be no escape.

Next to her, Pablo scratches his head, whistles and twitches.

This is also the cause of his stutter. His flailing arms and legs send the letters flying. Ff-ff-fatso, he calls her. Buh-buh-bitch.

Every one of the girl’s exercise books contain smudges because of him. Messages that Pablo gives her without so much as touching her pencil. With his juddering leg, he sends shockwaves through their shared desk. The boy and the girl. The fool and the thinker. The bully and the mute. That’s what they call her, the mute. But in her mind, in silence, she is speaking all the time. Sometimes, unconsciously, she even moves her lips. She poses a question, then answers it — it’s a never-ending dialogue. Then Pablo appears, elbows her and says: Who are you talking to, st-st-stupid? Who are you arguing with, wuh-wuhweirdo? She doesn’t respond out loud. She prefers not to hear her own voice. That way, no one is able say anything about her, and she, in turn, can’t say what she fears she might.

Twenty of the children have had their turn. There aren’t many left to go and Pablo is becoming increasingly skittish.

Rocking violently in his seat, he nearly loses his balance. This rolling motion to her left unsettles the girl. She pictures the seat falling backwards and hears a thud. A pool of blood forms on the floor and swells and swells until it reaches her dangling feet. The word, meanwhile, advances as if it has shed letters or whole syllables and is now much shorter: ‘roof’, ‘cloud’, ‘girl’, ‘mute’. Those who’ve already heard it can hardly wait. They start whispering among themselves and shuffling in their seats, but Pablo is the worst of all. Pablo keeps shouting and groaning so that no one can hear the true word. To ruin the game.

Seven to go. Six. The low murmur builds to a noise and then a racket. The teacher loses her patience. She turns to Pablo and warns him that if he isn’t quiet that instant he will be punished.

He’ll go without lunch, she says. Without break time. Without friends. Without his pill. Without. She still hasn’t understood that Pablo can’t stop. He doesn’t know how to stop. The girl, on the other hand, knows she’s going to die. Pablo whispered as much in her ear. He told her that one of these days, in the middle of the night, she’ll discover she can’t climb out of her own muteness. She’ll be stuck there in a dark, silent tomb.

And by way of preparation, because it’s good to be prepared, the girl practices dying. In the middle of all the commotion she closes her eyes, grits her teeth and holds her breath for as long as possible. What doesn’t make a sound doesn’t exist, she repeats to herself, what doesn’t make a sound isn’t there. But then she hears the beat of her own heart and starts breathing again.

The word continues on its round. It won’t be long now.

Five mouths. Four. Three. You can hear stifled yelps, impatient squeaks. The girl knows there’s no going back. There are only two to go now and Pablo can’t contain himself. He leans back in his chair, balancing on the two rear legs and lets himself fall.

The word reaches him at that precise moment. It slips into his ear and stays there, trapped. He frowns, bites his lip, and thinks.

This isn’t a game that requires thought. Listen and repeat, that’s all Pablo has to do and yet he won’t do it. The other children hurry him up. Even the teacher hurries him up. They shout at him to go on, to come out and say the word. The girl also wants to shout. Louder than any of them. She gives it a go — why not — filling up her chest and parting her lips, but the other children’s voices rush in, shaking her.

Pablo has the word and now he smiles. A forced grimace that terrifies the girl. The fear dries out her mouth, wakes her up. She feels more alert than ever. Alive, that’s it. She wonders if that game might not be a diversion tactic. To distract them from their frozen hands. Their blue nails. Their mutilated fingers on the floor. She is lost in this thought, even more terrified now.

And Pablo, as if he knew, takes advantage of her distractedness.

He tilts his head to the right, cups his hands around his mouth and leans into her ear. The word peels away from his lips and reaches the girl. She hears it with absolute clarity. She knows it.

A blast of heat rises up from her chest towards her face. As if

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that word had turned to fire in her body. As if, in the middle of that classroom, the girl was burning alive.

She hears shouting all around. Say it, say it. She is the obedient girl. The good girl. She knows the rules of the game.

The first: to listen. The second: to repeat. Her lips move, she can’t help it. Soundlessly they pronounce the word that she’s . And she repeats it twice, as if practicing it: heard: , . Then, caught up in her own muttering, she feels a punch in the back of her neck. It’s Pablo, his eyes blazing. He knows that he and the girl alone share the word.

That mortifying word that she is supposed to reveal. The game dictates it. The shouts dictate it. And she is a girl who does what others dictate.

Without a second thought she stands up, takes two steps forward and stops in the centre of the circle. Her throat closes up, her palms are sweaty and her mouth tastes tangy. The children around her fall silent. They’d forgotten all about this girl, but now, suddenly, they remember her. Her hands are clenched, her hair is in pigtails, her shoes are unpolished and her heart is beating wildly. What’s more, she has her eyes closed. If she can’t see, she can’t be seen; if only it were that simple. Nobody dares interrupt her. They all want to hear the word, the last word, the word that this girl has heard and must now repeat.

She swallows, takes a deep breath, and forces herself to open her eyes. She notices the lifeless heater. Outside it is drizzling.

She doesn’t know what to do. She looks up hoping to find a clue. The ceiling is white, blank, and that blankness gives her the answer. It’s so simple, so easy to lie. She only has to switch a noun, one little word.

The girl hesitates, thinks about it, but the moment she opens her mouth she can’t contain her own voice. It’s like bodies in water. Once they push off, once they dive in, nothing can stop them. Nothing can recover the word now that it has left her mouth. It doesn’t sound like her, it’s as if a new voice has emerged. The children listen carefully and after a moment’s pause, burst out laughing. More like shouts than laughter; wild, shrieking hoots. And nobody is looking at her anymore. All of them, she included, lock eyes on Pablo. And all of them, in unison, repeat the last word: Ritalin, Ritalin. It’s a tiny, bitter pill, and this time it has its intended effect. Pablo looks at her, baffled, his face flushing redder by the second. Now he is the mute. Finally, he is silent.

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Laura Cannell Conversing with Resonance

I have had many conversations with buildings. Most of the time through an instrument, a violin, double recorders, occasionally singing, and very rarely speaking aloud. Sneaking the keys for an iconic Suffolk water tower and going up the ladder accompanied by a friend in the middle of the night with a penny whistle to hear what the hollow metal at the top sounded like.

Everywhere I go I am going beyond the image in front. I am listening, thinking what would this sound like? and imagining making music.

For about five years from 2003 to 2008 I had a studio at The Old Bally Shoe Factory in Norwich, in the East of England, with my then musical duo partner Adrian. We would regularly move studios depending on the project or album we were working on. The condition and the size of the building meant there were limited number of people allowed to use it, and some gigantic factory floors to explore sonically. There was also the perk of my sister being the studio manager and curator for the company that owned the building between its former use and its ultimate demolition to make way for a giant supermarket on the edge of the city.

Some of our best work was created in a small, shadowy yellow room — a tiny office, not for someone important, tucked away near one of the back exits, down a very long corridor. We were re-composing traditional folk and early European dance music, improvising around musical ideas until one became embedded under our fingers and in our minds before moving on to the next passage. Our music did not fit into folk or early music. It was historically informed performance, but we were breaking it apart and putting it back together as new work inside the resonant spaces of the old shoe factory. The yellow room was bright and clear sounding, it felt intimate yet forgiving.

The metal blind on the single floor-to-ceiling window wavered on hot days when we coaxed the air in between practice recordings. Behind the little office, past the workers back stairs, there was an open factory floor with epic windows in glass furrows covering the ceiling. Peaks and troughs of light blasted through onto where the machinery once stood. The space and light of the factory influenced three albums. Although we composed, re-composed and invented the music at the Old Bally Shoe Factory, we always took the music to a different resonance to record it. It would be assembled in the factory and presented or recorded in the acoustics of a church or recording studio, like the shoes manufactured in the factory and then displayed in some glamorous shop.

Since that time in the factory, and the new beginnings of my solo work, I have built perimeters around my music. My ethos is about what I can do in the moment, on my own.

What can I create with the space, instruments, equipment in front of me?

I was not knowingly part of a DIY music scene, having studied the recorder for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and being a self-taught fiddle player. I did not really have a musical role-model because I could not see anybody making music in the way I was, or the way I wanted to. There was no precedent for what happened next, but a personal and professional need to explore sonically, and to use only the limited resources available to me. I knew that I did not want to record in conventional recording studios anymore, with an engineer or producer present. I wanted to find a space that responded when I spoke or played. My utterances meeting an open ear. An accepting resonance for my sonic explorations. I also needed it to be free, free of charge. I had no budget, but I had a car and some instruments and a zoom recorder.

I must be able to create something with these ingredients, after all, what has all the practising and reading and researching been for?

This was the very beginning of a new relationship with sound, of driving around to accessible buildings with instruments, finding churches with doors open from dawn to dusk, wondering what

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the lighthouse I had looked at all my life sounded like on the inside. Questioning why the sound of a cathedral was so peculiar, and then discovering that the part I had performed in was in fact a new build, recently extended with new stone. There was no history, no resonances had been soaked into those stones.

I decided not to chase concerts and fit myself into someone’s programming, but to think of places I would like to perform in, buildings that had a potentially interesting resonance. My first solo tour, after nearly ten years of playing in a duo, was called Medieval Uprising. I took fragments of ancient melodies and improvised around them in a series of performances throughout the UK. And the resonance of these buildings, and many others that came after, became part of my music. I converse with them (both in practice and in public performance). I have an instrument in my hands, and myself, to explore its nooks and crannies.

We both respond to sound.

If I do this, will you fight back? will you agree? will you laugh at me? will you change my pitch? will you leave me hanging? will you awaken? will you respond with rhetoric? will you make my job impossible in front of an audience?

Or will you be my best friend where we need no words to have a connection?

As I play, I ask...

Can you hear this?

What happens if I keep saying it over and over?

Will you push me off this note, will I fall off?

At the end of 2018 I was commissioned by The Wapping Project to use my working methods to capture a sonorous image of the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station during its final reign as a glorious, untampered with space. Empty of people, projects and objects but with a strong and clear voice. A voice which will change and needs to not be forgotten.

In early 2019 I spend hours in the cold, brittle air of the watery sounding chambers. My instruments were reacting to the cold, but I wanted them to be truthful, an honest reflection of the space in February and March 2019.

Each recording was made standing in a different position.

Allowing a different reverberation. Under the suspended staircase, in a doorway between two worlds.

Each piece unplanned except for maybe a few words and notation jotted onto a page, some fragmented conversations.

Each instrument responding with a balance of insecurity, questioning and confidence.

Until the sound is made, I do not know how you will respond.

What do you prefer?

Woodwind instruments played with the breathing in cold damp air, strings stretching in the moisture of being below water level, the free-floating bangs on metallic stairs, voices, or‌ I still don’t know.

It is the unexpected that I play into. The non-identical repetition, never saying the same thing twice. The joy and risk of moving fingers out of tune.

Is it me tuning the space, or is it the space tuning me?

I cannot predict or prescribe the music which will emerge from the time inside the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. I have come to terms with this working method. The years of overthinking, and over-analysing sounds, of trying to make them my slaves, of trying to always have the right answer‌ But now I know that music is not only created by my playing, the resonance is part of the instrument, its voice.

You want me to push you, to see where our conversation can go?

I will.

I will sing the words from T.S. Elliot in my head while I play the violin.

I will improvise upon fragments of Sappho.

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I will sing into the winter light shafts blazing through the windows meters above while I drone on the violin.

I will take the stories of bee keeping on the roof and retell them over and over on double recorders.

I will keep playing even when you are gone.

I will creak and rasp.

I will call across a once steam-powered space which has been home to innovation, inspiration, risk and chance.

I discover that one track, After You Left, is unintentionally dedicated to someone I have never met, but whose vision and memories I can feel inside the building, and in the people connected to it. Everyone comes alive when they talk about Jules Wright, her vision, her friendship. There is love in this building, this stark, industrial, functional cathedral of a building.

It is not only Jules, it is the original makers, the presence of people, making a structure of such power, an infrastructure where no human can reach the ceiling.

The smallest components of this building are the people, transient ideas and what-ifs. Taking place between cogs of iron and steel, winter light cascading upon exposed bricks and marked concrete through stiffening doors, for me, it became a Waters Deep Cathedral — a title for my album — a resonant mental place that I can bring on stage with me when I perform the new music created there in the future.

I cannot help feeling that I have arrived at that building after something spectacular has just taken place. I can feel the nervous energy in the air. The voices have only just left, continuing their conversations down the street towards the Thames.

I have taken the keys from a hook that I am not supposed to know about and let myself in. My instruments on my back, my own private time to converse with the resonance of this Watery Cathedral.

Waters Deep Cathedral will premiere at the Deep Minimalism festival at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, on 3 November 2019. The album will be released in 2020.

Contributors Laura Cannell is a composer and performer who draws on the emotional influences of landscape both rural and urban, real and imagined. Laura has released five critically acclaimed albums since 2014 and is regularly broadcast throughout the world including BBC Radio 3, 4, 6Music, The World Service, Polish National Radio and NPR. Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event producer and Whitechapel Gallery’s Adjunct Moving Image Curator. He is also co-curator of Porto’s Forum of the Future, Flipside and First Light, Swedenborg Film Festival and Estuary 2020. He commissioned and co-produced the essay film Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee. Sophie Hughes is a literary translator from Spanish to English.

She is known for her translations of contemporary writers such as Laia Jufresa, Rodrigo Hasbún, José Revueltas and Enrique Vila-Matas. Her translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán's The Remainder was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

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Karen Stuke is a Berlin-based artist working with photography.

Since the 1990s, she has been working with pinhole cameras as instruments for poetic exploration of time — its elusiveness, passage and traces. Karen’s notable projects include collaborations with some of the most prestigious theatres including Gottfried Pilz at the Vienna State Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Opéra Comique, Paris, the Los Angeles Opera. In 2008, she founded the project space Kronenboden in Berlin.

Alia Trabucco Zerán (Santiago, 1983) is a Chilean writer. Her debut novel, The Remainder, translated into English by Sophie Hughes, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won the Best Novel Award of the Chilean Council for the Arts. Her new book, Las Homicidas (2019), is a non-fiction account of how society portrays violent women. She lives between Santiago and London and is currently working on a new novel.

The Wapping Project would like to thank its Members. The writing commissions published here were made directly possible by their generous and continued support.

The Wapping Project is a platform for risk taking and continuous development of ideas, thoughts and people. It is our investment in, and enthusiasm for, the artists that we commission that forms the backbone of the artistic programme.

The Wapping Project questions and aims to redefine accepted boundaries through commissioning, nurturing and championing artistic talent.

We exist to enable artists to work with unrestrained ambition.

The Wapping Project (Women’s Playhouse Trust) is a registered charity N° 286384 Edition of 1000 Designed by Atelier Dyakova, London Printed by PUSH, London Copyright © The Wapping Project and individual contributors and authors, 2019.

Image credits p. 8–9: © Karen Stuke, Wilsonovo Nádraží (Wilson Station), Prague, 2013, from the body of work Stuke – After Sebald’s Austerlitz p. 12–13: © Karen Stuke, The Journey, 2013, from the body of work Stuke — After Sebald’s Austerlitz p. 16–17: © Karen Stuke, Stromovka Park, Prague, 2013, from the body of work Stuke — After Sebald’s Austerlitz p. 20–21: © Karen Stuke, Searching for Father, 2013, from body of work Stuke — After Sebald’s Austerlitz p. 24–25: © Karen Stuke, The Final Journey, 2013, from body of work Stuke — After Sebald’s Austerlitz p. 38: © Thomas Zanon-Larcher, Laura Cannell at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, March 2019 p.44–45: © Thomas Zanon-Larcher, Wapping, December 2010 thewappingproject.org info@thewappingproject.org

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