Inside the Echo Chamber
Poet Philip Gross responds to the sound installation
The first gift you can offer, in an artwork or a conversation, is space. In a generous space we feel received but free to have our own reactions, to stay or to go. We have a choice. Choice is at the heart of Echo Chamber: the historic choice whether to fight when the state commands but your conscience refuses, and the struggle for the right to make that choice.
At first, the space looks anything but generous: a white octagon that might suggest a tent, a field hospital, maybe, because, look, the walls are bandage, painstakingly stitched. The joins are visible. They could be wounds or scars.
Equally, it could be a cell, this space in which you can choose to sit or to pace. It could be a Quaker Meeting. The room is small, but opens upwards into a great spaciousness of light. That’s the second gift: the light. The third gift is silence – not one silence but the breaths, the hesitations and the reflective pauses that open between the words around you.
This might seem strange, to mention the words last, when each voice is eloquent, each a testimony to making that almost unthinkably demanding choice. Inside the chamber you can choose to move round, attending to each voice, or you can listen to them all together, with their overlaps, counterpoints, moments of near babble… then one or two contribute a silence in which other words rise, exposed and raw.
Sometimes, too, quietness brings in sounds around us. I first heard this installation in a railway shed, with now and then the rumble of a passing train. Or the sound might be traffic in the Euston Road. Or even birdsong. The world is very much with us. We still have, and have to exercise, the choice.
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