SOUNDSCAPE PLAYBACK:
Work by Azby Brown, 2025
Audio: AI-generated voice, text by Azby Brown, with field recordings and and found audio.
Photos by: Gaston Meskens, Dana László da Costa, Karl Schickhardt
Conceived for “Exiles of the Psyche,” Azby Brown & Gaston Meskens
Floating University, Berlin 5 -7 September 2025
A utopienale 2025 event
TEXT:
Nineteen miserable years have I lived in America.
I didn’t come seeking a better life.
I was escaping death.
Every home is not mine.
Imagine still being home and saying, ‘Oh, I miss home.’
What an odd thing, such a hard feeling to convey.
Empty seats at the bar.
Shop signs in unfamiliar script.
Police in unfamiliar uniforms.
Talking in the dirty loss of light,
Enveloped in the shadow of indifference,
Falling from one shadow into another,
Estranged from that greater world.
I do not see myself there.
How could I?
What is wrong with these people?
What is wrong with my family?
What is wrong with me?
I rang the bell at an unmarked door, and creaking floorboards invited me into a home.
A home full of rooms.
Every room not mine.
I slept in a bed.
The bed was burned to ashes.
The time will come when no one will speak to you at all, not even complete strangers….
You will be quite alone with your voice, there will be no other voice in the world but yours……
Do you hear me?
When will these dark times pass?
How much longer do we have to endure this?
That was when I first learned I was expendable.
Poof! A puff of smoke, and then I am gone.
Exiled from my own skull.
I am not here now.
I am not there.
Exile is a precursor of death.
I carry my corpse like a kind of tumor,
a glowing memory drenched in pain.
Like being in a coffin.
Light seeping in through the cracks,
The smell of grilling chicken.
Maybe I am sleeping again.
When I awake, which parts of me will remain?
The world is in my head.
My body is in an unknown world
Desperate to leave some trace.
So many did not make it.
Like so many puffs of smoke,
Disappearing.
Who will be left?
The city now awash in fleeing professors,
Architects, cooks, thieves.
Children.
I didn’t let go of you, did I?
It was you.
I’m sure it was you.
Damn you.
Damn you.
Damn you.
Damn you.
Fuck them all.
The bed was burned to ashes.
The bed was burned to ashes.
The bed was burned to ashes.
The bed was burned to ashes.